Review
In July 2020, in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shudder released Rob Savage's indie horror film Host, about a group of friends in lockdown who summon a demon during a séance performed (and shot) on Zoom. It's a fun, terrifying jump-scare fest that earned near-universal praise and announced Savage as a new voice in horror, showcasing clever, creative filmmaking under lockdown constraints. He revisited the screenlife approach with 2021's DASHCAM, and pivoted to traditional filmmaking with the 2023 adaptation of Stephen King's The Boogeyman; both opened to mixed reviews, and neither lived up to the promise of Host. In 2026, his latest film, Other Mommy, was announced with a teaser trailer preceding Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which went viral for an all-time jump scare at the end, promising a worthy successor to Host, or at least, a campy fun time.
An adaptation of Josh Malerman's novel Incidents Around the House, Other Mommy opens with 7-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) jumping on her bed and dancing with her father, Russ (Jay Duplass), their nightly ritual before Bela's bedtime. Her mother, Ursula (Jessica Chastain), arrives home late from work, interrupts the fun, and insists Bela go to bed. After some light marital tension passes, they turn off the lights and close the door as Bela tells them "good night" and goes to sleep. Except when her parents are out of earshot, she crawls to the edge of her bed and whispers "good night" to the darkness of her closet, asking if Other Mommy is available to play.
The rest of the film stays in Bela's POV as her parents' growing unhappiness drives her further into the arms of Other Mommy, an entity that takes the form of her mother and only wants to be "let into her heart". On paper, this is a coming-of-age story as Bela learns her parents are fallible and that the emotional and physical scars we carry throughout life are what make us human. In execution, it's a 90-minute collection of jump scares, loosely connected by a hair-thin plot that simply moves the characters from one jump scare to the next.
The film has a few aspects worth celebrating. One welcome subversion of horror tropes is that everyone who encounters the supernatural accepts it almost instantly. Other Mommy isn't coy about revealing its presence, whether at home or in public. Jessica Chastain also gives a fantastic double performance as mama-bear Ursula and her truly creepy demonic doppelganger.
Everything else is just a mess. The movie essentially starts in the third act, with Other Mommy already around for a while and Bela's parents one step away from divorce. There's no buildup or exposition about what the entity actually is, save an opening title card claiming demons are jealous of humans being alive. The same is true for Russ and Ursula. We have no idea why their marriage is struggling, or why they fell in love in the first place, until the very end of their mutual arc. What should be a cathartic confession becomes a speed-run of the missing first two acts for their characters.
The subversion of the "no one believes me" trope also begs questions about the nature of the supernatural in this world. One sequence takes place at a public playhouse, where many random onlookers witness impossible circumstances, but we don't know whether this is a huge revelation for the world or something that happens occasionally. This is reinforced by the introduction of a Ghostbusters-like element that completely changes the movie's tone for 15 minutes before it goes back and acts like it never happened.
Rob Savage bragged about having one jump scare every 2 minutes during the press tour, and this is true, since almost every sequence ends in one. Host was also a collection of jump scares, but each of those arose naturally from the story and the Zoom conceit, leveraging features of the app in creative ways. Here, it feels like the writers wrote down their top 10 "oh man, wouldn't THIS be scary" moments, and then reverse-engineered a story to thread them together. A couple of scare sequences showcase creative uses of surrealism, but they come so often that they lose potency and feel weightless, not least because of some undercooked CGI.
Somewhere in the marrow of Other Mommy is a much more interesting film than what we got. As it stands, the lack of coherence and scares makes for a bewilderingly disappointing watch.
