OTHER MOMMY

OTHER MOMMY is a good example of a film that does everything you’ve seen before from this kind of horror movie… but does it well enough that you can’t get mad at any of it. It delivers the genre basics. It doesn’t hit you over the head with jump scares as bad horror movies do, and it clearly took a lot of effort to make it look as good as possible. The film gets creative with how the Other Mommy enters the frame and how she looks in her final forms. And the acting is really good across the board.

The film’s biggest strength and biggest weakness both center on the Oscar-winner front and center. According to Google, Jessica Chastain has played a woman in a broken yet active marriage no fewer than five times on screen and once on Broadway. She is massively overqualified for this material and elevates it way beyond what it deserves… at least when it comes to the dramatic scenes. The real strangeness comes from her playing the titular Other Mommy, a demonic, shape-shifting ghoul… a role she is miscast in.

The Other Mommy is the film’s only critical flaw. Mind you, the movie does a great job of showing the terror she rains down on this family. The problem is that it never gives her a set of rules to follow. There’s no explanation of her origin and no detail about the extent of her supernatural power. Because of that, we are made to believe that a creature of a little girl’s imagination is the Diet Coke version of Dormammu from DOCTOR STRANGE. As the movie goes on, she puts on outward displays of power that make no sense for her to have. On top of that, her motive for terrorizing people outside the family (yes, she makes public appearances in the film) is minuscule. I couldn’t help but ask why she’s so committed to wreaking that kind of havoc. And Chastain just has no menace. She never presents an imposing figure, even when the character is doing more movie stuff. To say she’s slightly creepy in her disposition is giving her as much credit as I possibly can.

***

It’s almost Halloween. As far as I can tell, this is the largest theatrical horror release leading up to the holiday, which is very strange. OTHER MOMMY is valiantly trying to be as much of a hit as it can. It doesn’t exactly fail at its job. But it comes absolutely nowhere close to succeeding.