When Mommy at some point realizes that she has to reveal a supposedly dark – but actually not that bad – family secret to her seven-year-old daughter in order to ward off the titular demon, she gets little more than a shrug of the shoulders from the cinema audience. “Other Mommy” is based on the psychologically sophisticated and consistently devastating horror drama “Incidents Around The House”* by “Bird Box” author Josh Malerman, but it is precisely these two strengths that are lost in the big screen adaptation by “The Boogeyman” director Rob Savage: the specific horrors of childhood, which play a central role in the first 20 minutes, are soon lost in the general storm of effects – and you can’t get away with a happy ending in Hollywood these days anyway out.
What remains is the idea of a poltergeist who looks exactly like her own mother – and therefore like the demonically grinning Oscar winner Jessica Chastain. That alone was enough to cut an incredibly effective trailer – and this in turn ensured that the jump-scare shocker, which had a modest budget of around 18 million dollars, became a considerable hit in the USA and the rest of the world. But there isn’t much more to see in the full film about the Other Mommy than in the trailer – instead, the poltergeist takes on all sorts of forms in the Pennywise tradition. So you don’t really get to know the people or the demon in the surreal CGI hustle and bustle – and even if Rob Savage makes every effort to stage the shocker set pieces, the tension ultimately falls by the wayside.
As an Oscar winner, Jessica Chastain can smile at least as disturbingly as all the grinning cheeks from “Smile”.
Ursula (Jessica Chastain) and Russ (Jay Duplass) are celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary, but it’s not just their daughter Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) who realizes that something is wrong in this family. Mommy works longer and longer hours in the evenings and seems a little too familiar with Daddo’s best friend Frank (Arian Moayed). But just in case, the seven-year-old also has Other Mommy (also: Jessica Chastain), who is hiding in the closet of the children’s room and is determined to persuade Bela to swap places with her.
But at some point the demon is no longer satisfied with always just appearing to the little girl – instead he attacks Russ in broad daylight, and Ursula can’t maintain her point of view that it’s all just her imagination for long. Now it’s time to escape – first to “Uncle” Frank and finally to Ursula’s mother Ruth (Karen Allen), who has been familiar with conversations about the afterlife since her husband’s death and also has the right rapid response ghost hunter team at hand…
Surrealistic visions instead of straightforward shocks
Grinning was scary even before “Smile” – and the upturned corners of Jessica Chastain’s (“The Eyes Of Tammy Faye”) mouth are almost as disturbing as her limbs, which twist like insects in all imaginable directions. Her performances as a demonic doppelganger are the best thing about the film – and it makes perfect sense why the horror-loving audience packed the halls on the US opening weekend after the trailers were tailored to her. Nevertheless, “Other Mommy” not only failed the film critics, but also received mostly disappointing reviews from cinemagoers (the equivalent of a school grade of 4+ in the Cinemascore).
The reason for this is simple: “Other Mommy” doesn’t deliver what the trailer promises. Instead of more Chastain shockers, “Other Mommy” presents itself with the mirror world into which Bela repeatedly immerses herself, primarily as a somnambulistic surrealist horror somewhere between “ES”, “Insidious” and “Coraline”. Rob Savage, whose “Host” was for a time considered the scariest film of all time, goes all out in terms of staging: Right at the beginning there is a circling tracking shot in the children’s room, in which the camera and therefore the audience suddenly find themselves in the closet – and later on, there are always large images in the scary set pieces, of golden balloons full of glitter, a ball pit in the sea spray and a ghost hunt with different colored neon safety vests.
When Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) doesn’t want to swap places with Other Mommy, the demon becomes increasingly harsher.
The only problem is that it all soon seems so incredibly arbitrary. “IT” connoisseurs of course know that the demon appears in various forms – but in the end, everyone wants to see Pennywise above all else. And that’s exactly how it is in “Other Mommy”: If the entity suddenly rages in a more classic demon form, that may not be a bad thing, but in a film called “Other Mommy” you also want Other Mommy. In addition, the plot just speeds past you in the 95 minutes: When an entire army of ghost hunters, led by chief exorcist Lois Anthony (“Severance” star Dichen Lachman), sets up shop at your grandmother’s estate, you expect big things – and not that they move on to the next station five minutes later.
The very obvious use of CGI in the design of demons and intermediate worlds doesn’t necessarily help either. Right at the beginning there is a damn strong, disturbing sequence in which no pixel had to be tricked: Bela is brought downstairs again in her pajamas by her father in order to push her across the crowd of guests at the wedding anniversary party and proudly show her off. You can feel how oppressive and invasive the adult world must feel for the little girl in this situation – and it’s exactly moments like these that the Other Mommy shock effects should have been added to. The novel demonstrated it.
Conclusion: Director Rob Savage and his leading actress Jessica Chastain visibly give their all – but in the end “Other Mommy” still feels as if someone had strung together several half-finished scary films instead of telling one of them properly.