By Matthew Moorcroft

Screw This

• Directed by Rob Savage
• Starring Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass, Arabella Olivia Clark, Karen Allen
• R

With a premise that ponders an R rated version of Coraline, there is little reason to go into Other Mommy without at least a passing interest. It’s a rarity to get a horror film from the perspective of a child, let alone one clearly dealing with trauma unbeknownst to both them and the parents, and director Rob Savage has a history of putting otherwise unconventional protagonists at the center of his horror work, whether it be successful (the ghost obsessed recluse in Host) or grating (the right-wing Twitch streamer in Dashcam). In some ways, Other Mommy should be something of an easy slam dunk, the kind of horror movie studios can make in their sleep and not have to worry about diminishing returns.

But of course, the other obvious outcome – the one that ended up being the truth – is that Other Mommy is something of a train wreck, a nigh-disaster of a horror flick that is neither scary enough to facilitate an emotional reaction out of you nor compelling enough to maintain at least a vague interest in whatever story beats it has conjured up. Whether or not it’s Savage’s usual mean streak deflated by clear corporate interests in wanting to appeal to a wider audience or just him being out of his depth with a concept that needs a defter, more nuanced approach is hard to say, but the final result speaks for itself with it’s languid pace.

As Other Mommy begins, we are thrust into the story without much warning. The presence is already something that’s ingrained in the fabric of the household, even if it’s only visible to the young girl who the movie places much of it’s focus on. But it doesn’t take long for the entity to make itself visible to everyone else, and while it does remove much of the usual back and forth with these kinds of flicks, as Other Mommy clearly wants to be a more visceral “all meat” kind of flick, but the gimmick wears itself thin pretty quickly as the overwrought CGI of much of the scares and the repetitiveness of it’s structure derails much of it’s impact. When each scare has the same buildup and same endpoint, it’s impossible to not just look at the time and wonder how much more of this you got to take.

So much of this wouldn’t matter if the film’s thematic and emotional cores weren’t as barebones as they were, but while Savage and writer Nathan Elston clearly have some things to say about the ways women are forced into motherhood maybe against their will it’s surrounded by strange narrative decisions that bungle it’s own impact. Character beats are dropped by the wayside as soon as they are brought up, and possible through lines for story opportunities are discarded as soon as they are brought into the fold. I would say it’s trying to replicate the feeling of being a child and the confusing time of growing up in a world where adults seemingly do strange and contradictory things, but the movie itself lacks an internal engine for that level of complexity.

Instead, while the child performance of newcomer Arabella Olivia Clark is the shining high point of the flick – she certainly has talent and a great career ahead of her – her character is mostly reduced to one with no agency outside of an ending that doesn’t add up in it’s greater ambitions due to multiple third act bungles. Chastain herself feels weirdly undercooked here, though clearly relishing the chance to play a horror creature in the rare moments she does get to be campier. A far stronger flick would have Clark reckoning with her innocence being shattered forever, but instead the film retreats into nonsense about family saving the day in beats that wouldn’t be out of place in a Saturday morning cartoon rather then an R rated horror flick.

It’s all so tired at this point. Everything about Other Mommy feels designed to be put on AI-TikTok movie explainers reels, the kind of flick that has you mostly more whelmed at it’s existence rather then actually moved by it’s presence. And for a movie where a presence has infested every aspect of a life, that’s something equivalent to a fatal flaw. A deeply boring dud of a flick, and one that you would be best off avoiding entirely unless forced by your own Other Mommy to experience.