‘Other Mommy’ Review: Is the Scariest Thing in This House Its Own Mother?

‘Other Mommy’ lands in theaters on October 9, and it arrives with more pre-release chatter than most Halloween horror gets. Its trailer ran ahead of ‘The Odyssey’ and sent a good number of moviegoers jumping, mostly because of one shot of Jessica Chastain folded under a kitchen table with her limbs bent in all the wrong directions.

Rob Savage, the director behind ‘Host’ and ‘The Boogeyman’, adapts Josh Malerman’s novel ‘Incidents Around the House’ from a script by Nathan Elston, with James Wan producing. Young Bela, played by Arabella Olivia Clark, already lives in a home strained by her parents’ marriage when something starts slipping out of her closet wearing her mother’s face. It asks her one question again and again, whether it can go inside her heart.

Chastain plays both the worn down mother Ursula and the creature, and she is easily the strongest reason to buy a ticket. She commits to the physical strangeness of the role without winking at it, and she gives the real mother enough warmth that you feel the threat of being replaced. Savage told Empire that the book’s core idea is to ask what if this actually happened to you and your family, and the first act plays with that grounded dread nicely.

The trouble is that the film cannot keep that restraint going. Once the entity stops hiding, the quiet uncertainty about who is standing in the doorway gives way to louder set pieces, and the louder it gets, the less the scares actually land. The creature looks great, but looking great is not the same as being frightening.

The family around her is only partly served by the script. Jay Duplass is believable as the father trying to hold the household together, yet he has little room to do more than react, and Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen mostly orbit the main trio. Clark carries the emotional core well, and the film works best whenever it stays tethered to her point of view.

There are moments when the movie reminds you what it could have been, particularly early on when you cannot tell whether a gesture is tender or sinister. Then it drifts toward a familiar supernatural showdown, and the ending plays it far safer than the premise deserves. At 93 minutes it never drags, which counts for something, and the R rating for some bloody violence and language keeps things nasty without turning it into a gore fest.

Savage clearly has the eye for an unforgettable image, and this film has a few that will stick in your head long after the plot fades. What it lacks is the patience to build the slow unease that its own best scenes promise. I walked out admiring the craft and Chastain’s nerve far more than I was shaken by the story.

My verdict is that ‘Other Mommy’ is an uneven but watchable creature feature carried by a fearless dual performance, and I give it 6 out of 10.

Did ‘Other Mommy’ get under your skin or did it lose you once the monster stepped out of the closet, and do you agree with my verdict, so tell me in the comments.