If you caught The Odyssey in theaters this year, there’s a good chance you saw a certain trailer featuring a demonic Jessica Chastain traumatizing her husband and child. For the three times I saw Nolan’s epic on the big screen, each time the mingling audience would slow their conversation and react in terror to this short clip of Chastain clinging like a spider under her kitchen island. It’s a good sign for horror when the trailer can pull audience attention like that, but does Other Mommy hold up as a full-length experience?
I’ll say yes with some reservations. This comes from Rob Savage, who’s had a mixed bunch of horror films including Host (2020), Dashcam (2021) and The Boogeyman (2023). With his latest, Other Mommy, Savage uses one perfectly acceptable selling point: Jessica Chastain. Since her real breakouts in 2011 with Take Shelter and Tree of Life, Chastain has consistently proven herself as capable, emotion-driven, and fierce in all the different characters she inhabits. This isn’t her first foray into horror with her roles in Mama (2013) and as adult Beverly Marsh in It: Chapter Two (2019). Now, she’s asked to play both sides of the horror here: as the reluctant mother Ursula and the titular Other Mommy.
Ursula is the husband of Russ, or as he’s known in the household, Daddo (Jay Duplass), and mother to Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark). It’s not hard to key into some strained history within this family household, but things remain relatively normal until Bela reveals she’s been seeing a woman in her room at night that looks like her mother. What helps this find a bit of unlikeness to the “predictable horror formula” of it all is that with this early scare, Daddo sees the entity along with Bela. Shortly after, Ursula witnesses the Other Mommy as well. So, this becomes a family affair instead of the expected arguments over a supposed child’s imagination and things that aren’t real. The three then work as a unit to fend off this demon from taking possession of Bela, but not without some dramatic troubles outside of this evil as well.
Though a lot of these sequences can get very jumpscare-dependent, Savage does infuse some freaky creativity that helps to draw you into the darkness of the horror elements as opposed to resisting them. One sequence that takes place in a McDonald’s-esque “kid’s zone” really took my breath away. This may not last for the whole film, but for the first two-thirds, it keeps a tense momentum as this family struggles to find answers. Much to my surprise, Other Mommy really only carries one or two big moments of visceral gore. While I could’ve used a few more, their illusiveness makes them quite effective because when it hits, it hits.
The struggle with Other Mommy comes from its heavy-handed reliance on “unprocessed trauma” to send the emotion home. Instead of dosing it out, this aspect overwhelms the final third of its real dangerous stakes and opts for a few eye-rolling scenes that horror-goers have seen time and time again within the “elevated horror” boom that desperately needs revamping.
Another aspect of horror movies that constantly remains hard to nail is the child performances. Often annoying, troublesome, or poorly written, a bad child actor can easily take you out of a story like this. Thankfully, Arabella Olivia Clark carries a genuine innocence that helps make her a key figure for Other Mommy. This balance of curiosity and suspicion of this seemingly welcoming entity in her mind always makes sense for the narrative and what we as an audience would expect a child to do in a given scenario.
Jay Duplass is a bit of a dopey dad, but serves this role well enough. Though, as I broached before, Chastain is really the one putting her weight into this movie. She has some wonderfully terrifying abilities within her expressions that allow for horror to seep in solely through her unedited gaze. Granted, Savage plays with some wild visual effects as well to show the monstrification of the Other Mommy’s appearance as things get more and more grim.
It certainly isn’t one of the many 2026 horror success stories, but it is worth enough for horror fans (or Jessica Chastain fans) to have a decently scary time at the theaters. If anything, you’ll probably get a laugh out of how much they say “Other Mommy” throughout.
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