'Other Mommy' Is a 'Poltergeist' Wannabe That Makes Every Character a Nightmare | Review

Published Oct 9, 2026, 6:18 PM EDT

Gabrielle Moss has been writing about pop culture for over a decade, for publications including The New Yorker, GQ.com, Slate, Bustle, New York Magazine, and many more. Her book, 
"Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction," was released in 2018, and she was featured in the 2023 documentary "Judy Blume Forever."

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Jessica Chastain has an Oscar. While her name may evoke her Obama-era reign as queen of highbrow blockbusters, her Oscar arrived only four years ago, for her work in the titular role of 2021's The Eyes of Tammy Faye. And even if she's no longer on the hot streak that saw her log movies like The Help, Zero Dark Thirty, Interstellar, The Martian and Crimson Peak nearly back-to-back, she still frequently turns in excellent, thoughtful work, like her 2023 Emmy-nominated turn as on Showtime's George & Tammy.

So one has to wonder exactly how an Oscar winner ended up as the star of Other Mommy, a film that feels like something you might find while scrolling through the deepest reaches of Shudder. Other Mommy is a confounding, bizarre mess about a suburban clan being stalked by the titular entity (Chastain), an interdimensional shape-shifting ghoul who wants to steal the soul of daughter Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) — and sometimes becomes the physical doppelganger of Ursula (also Chastain), the family's distracted, workaholic matriarch.

Was Chastain seduced by the prospect of playing two roles, even if they're paper thin? It certainly couldn't be the film's direction, which is limp and inert, or the script itself, a barely-written kid-in-peril narrative that dares to ask the question, "What would Poltergeist be like if it wasn't scary and you hated every character?" Convoluted and unforgivably boring, Other Mommy's attempts at both basic scares and big ideas fall flat, leaving you with only one question to keep you occupied throughout its 93-minute runtime: how did an actress this good end up in a movie this bad?

What Is 'Other Mommy' About?

Image via Universal Pictures

Bela (Clark) is an only child living in a gorgeous house with her wealthy, kind, and neglectful parents: Ursula, a busy professional who is immediately telegraphed to be resentful of and cheating on Russell (Jay Duplass), a sweet layabout who is constantly inept, often stoned, and frequently asleep. With both of her parents almost continually distracted, Bela had plenty of time to play with her only friend, Other Mommy.

Though many initial reactions to the trailer pegged the film as a live-action remake of Coraline, Other Mommy is actually much closer to a kind of demonic Cat in the Hat; rather than giving Bela the loving home life she craves, Other Mommy takes her on bizarre, whimsical adventures through the house's many, many, many closets. Other Mommy is a shapeshifter, though that ability is more often used to unintentional comedic effect rather than anything truly sinister. Sometimes, Other Mommy looks like Jessica Chastain; other times, she looks like Jessica Chastain with eight legs, Jessica Chastain if she was in Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" video, Jessica Chastain if she was Pirate Clark from Backrooms, or, once things truly take a turn, Jessica Chastain if she were wearing a Deadite costume purchased at Spirit Halloween. She also bleeds glitter, can become 100 feet tall, and constantly demands to be "let in" to Bela's heart. We eventually find out that specifically means Other Mommy seeks to possess the elementary school-aged child; in exchange, she will keep the girl from feeling the pain of her disappointing family.

It's all fine and dandy, it seems, until the day Russell (who is obnoxiously referred to as "Daddo" rather than "dad") sees Other Mommy, in all her spider-legged glory. This is Other Mommy's first, and most promising, development: rather than following the classic horror formula where the kid complains about supernatural terrors only to have the parents blow it off, Russell immediately believes that there is an eight-legged version of his wife crouched under their kitchen island. Reacting with genuine terror and appropriate concern, Daddo (ugh) becomes perhaps the first character in horror movie history to call the police at the moment when any normal person would call the police, instead of ignoring the danger to further the plot.

However, rather than using this break with tradition as a jumping-off point to tell a fresh and unorthodox horror tale, Other Mommy just kind of leaves it there. Perhaps Russell is okay to abstain from furthering the plot because there isn't really a plot to speak of. Regular Mommy soon sees Other Mommy, too, and then... nothing happens.

Or rather, the same thing happens, over and over: Other Mommy shows up, she scares someone, she temporarily snatches Bela away to a magical netherworld, and tries once again to possess her. Periodically, Other Mommy kills a character whom we barely know and thus feel no real connection to. Then, Other Mommy goes away. Ursula and Russell spend roughly five minutes trying to find a solution to this whole "an eldritch entity is intent on consuming our daughter's soul" situation, then they just kind of give up until the next horrible thing happens. Rinse, repeat, murder, with the whole ordeal lurching towards an ending that makes almost no sense, and immediately contradicts itself in its final moments.

'Other Mommy' Forgets to Be Frightening

Though a lot of press has emphasized the film's sheer number of jump scares — director Rob Savage estimated that there were 50 in an interview with Entertainment Weekly — the only moment that might genuinely frighten viewers is Russell's initial sighting of Other Mommy, which was revealed in the trailer. I spent a lot of time searching for this film's 49 other scares and found myself coming up empty-handed. Other Mommy's rubbery face and frequent appearance in mirrors might be intended to startle, but they're significantly less chilling than something you might find on an old episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?

This might be because Are You Afraid of the Dark? — as well as the countless other films and TV shows that are scarier than Other Mommy — bothered with having actual plot structure. This movie has no traditional story developments; the only signs that it is moving into its second and third acts are changes of scenery. The family first decamps to the home of Ursula's obvious dalliance, where things go wrong, and then to her kooky, ghost-loving mother's gothic mansion, where things continue to go wrong. The film most explicitly references Poltergeist during the trip to grandma's, in a sequence complete with a seance, an overly confident psychic, and a big, open staircase just waiting for something terrible to come down it. But like the rest of the film, this section lacks style and stakes, and when it ends, it's like it never even happened.

Part of the problem is that the stakes are never clear. Of course, no one wants an evil fiend from beyond space and time to steal a little girl's soul. But how did Other Mommy even end up in Bela's life? It's not a Coraline or Labyrinth-style case of a child's impulsive wish gone wrong; Bela seems to wish for nothing much at all. Even though Other Mommy constantly promises to end Bela's pain, Bela isn't depicted to be particularly suffering — she appears equally happy with Daddo's half-assed parenting and Other Mommy's antics (at least until Other Mommy amps up the whole "give me your soul" bit). Because of this, we don't see a child learning to become more mature; instead, we are just watching a little girl get tormented for no particular reason. During the movie, I literally took the note, "Why am I watching a child watch a man's head explode?" We also don't see her parents grow into new, better people; since the film focuses on Bela's experience, we barely get to know them beyond their basic outlines, which don't seem to change significantly.

Clark, like Duplass, does the best she can with what she's given, which is almost nothing. But Chastain is actively underwhelming. Her Ursula is cold in an uninteresting, cookie-cutter way; her Other Mommy seems to have no real motivation, even in scenes when she is explicitly spelling out her motivation. But even this might be down to the script: if Other Mommy is a demon trying to trick and tempt Bela into forking over her soul, why does she act so weird and off-putting? If she's just a weirdo from another world who isn't sure how to act on earth, why is she murdering everybody? And what does Other Mommy even plan to do once she's inhabiting a 10-year-old's body, anyway? Kill some people with a Squishmallow?

The brightest spot may be Karen Allen's brief turn as Bela's wacky-yet-wise grandmother, who gets the film's big thematic monologue: pain and being hurt by the people you love are part of the human experience, and Other Mommy's promises that she can make Bela immune to pain are lies. But her appearance ends almost as quickly as it began, leaving us back in the uninspired arms of Mommy Prime and Daddo.

Director Savage made a splashy debut with 2020's Host, an innovative ghost story shot entirely over Zoom. Host is legitimately frightening, with a freshness that seemed to promise big things. His follow-up, the similarly themed Dashcam, which followed an obnoxious streamer through a crazed demonic encounter, was less scary, but still felt like it established Savage's energetic and unique house style. But his pivot into more traditional filmmaking seems to have sapped all the juice from his direction. Other Mommy lacks an identity or point of view; the camera is merely pointed in Chastain's direction as she slithers around the house, The Ring-style. It's the cherry on top of an inane script and blah scares, fully insuring that the audience remains 100% divested from whatever happens.

Maybe Chastain, who was actually a delight in the 2013 motherhood-themed horror Mama, wanted to make Other Mommy to get in on the elevated horror boom, which has largely passed her by. But if anything, Other Mommy might be a sign that that trend's moment has ended. Though it has all the trappings — a big name star, a non-slasher villain, and a storyline that allegedly deals with "big issues" — Other Mommy is a hollow copy, as unconvincing a version of the real thing Other Mommy herself.

Other Mommy

3 10

Cast

• 

  Ursula / Other Mommy

• 

  Arabella Olivia Clark

  Bela

Pros & Cons

• Karen Allen is a rare bright spot in a brief appearance that seems dropped in from another, better film.

• An incoherent plot makes it tough to care what happens to the leads.
• Jessica Chastain plays below her abilities in a dual role that's twice as disappointing.
• A lack of atmosphere and barely-there scares make the film a drag to watch.