Synopsis: A seven-year-old girl is stalked by a malevolent entity emerging from her closet: a shapeshifting doppelgänger that will stop at nothing to swap places with her.
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass, Arabella Olivia Clark, Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed, Karen Allen
Director: Rob Savage
Rated: R
Running Length: 93 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Josh Malerman wrote a scary book and Rob Savage made a freakier movie out of it, which almost never happens. Jessica Chastain plays both halves of one nightmare and you trust neither, while seven-year-old Arabella Olivia Clark carries nearly the whole thing. It sags a little at both ends, but the craft, scares and heartbreak make it one of the year’s best. 
Review:
Josh Malerman’s “Incidents Around the House” is a scary AF novel and Other Mommy is a freaky AF movie, and those are two separate accomplishments. Most horror adaptations manage one or the other. This one lands both, and I think screenwriter Nathan Elston has an edge on the book it came from. That is not a sentence I get to write often.
Other Mommy Improves on the Book, and That Almost Never Happens
The trick is in what Elston cut and what he refused to cut. He trims repetitive passages that work on the page but would drag on screen, and when he needs to lose a character, he folds that function into another scene instead of simply deleting it. Malerman’s intent survives intact. It just moves faster. That’s a smart play because it serves the readers who know every beat and the people who bought a ticket for a good scare. No, scratch that. A great scare. This film has plenty of them.
Seven-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark, The Housemaid) has started talking to something that emerges from her closet. She calls it Other Mommy. Worse, it looks an awful lot like her actual Mommy (Jessica Chastain, Dark Phoenix). Her parents are already having problems, and Bela doesn’t have the emotional vocabulary to understand what is happening between Mommy and Daddo (Jay Duplass, Pain Hustlers). She does understand that something feels wrong.
That distinction matters because Other Mommy isn’t simply a boogeyman stalking a kid. She asks Bela to “enter her heart,” which makes the threat far more unsettling. Bela isn’t just being chased. She’s being invited to participate. A monster that asks permission is scarier than one that simply takes, especially when the person being asked is a child who can’t possibly understand what she is agreeing to.
Other Mommy also becomes the shape Bela gives to everything she senses but cannot name: the tension between her parents, the secrets adults think they’re hiding, and the first painful realization that Mommy and Daddo exist as people outside of her. Childhood innocence starts slipping away before the creature ever gets its claws into her.
The scariest thing in Other Mommy may be realizing your parents are people.
Chastain Plays Both, and You Trust Neither
Chastain is so good with this kind of material. She plays Mommy and she plays the thing wearing Mommy’s face, and you believe both precisely because you never fully trust either one. There’s a little Coraline running through the conceit, that queasy suspicion that the warmer, more attentive version of your mother may be the one you should be running from. Chastain has visited this neighborhood before in Mama and Crimson Peak, but she’s never been asked to split herself down the middle quite like this. She hides the seam completely.
Clark has the harder job. Bela is in nearly every scene, carries the emotional weight of the story and has to sell some very kiddie dialogue without becoming obnoxious. I never want to hear the word “Daddo” again in my life, but Clark gets through it because Bela grows with the movie rather than simply reacting to it. By the back half, she’s holding her own opposite an Academy Award winner in full monster mode. That is not a small thing to pull off.
Duplass gives the family an essential warmth, and Karen Allen (Things Heard and Seen) is terrific as Grandma Ruth. Savage clearly has affection for Allen because some of the film’s most visually expressive passages belong to her. Dichen Lachman (Jurassic World: Dominion) and Arian Moayed (You Hurt My Feelings) help widen the family and paranormal worlds without stealing Bela’s perspective.
Savage Builds His Scares Instead of Springing Them
Savage (Host) creates genuinely hair-raising passages here. Some are quick jolts that will have you catching your popcorn bag in midair. Others are extended frights that test your white-knuckle grip on the armrest, or the arm of whoever is unlucky enough to be sitting beside you. What impressed me is not simply that the scares work. It’s how they are constructed.
Savage stacks effects, cinematography, makeup and sound design into sequences that keep climbing after you’re sure they have topped out. This is horror filmmaking where you can feel everyone behind the camera trying to scare the hell out of you.
Cinematographer Lowell A. Meyer keeps the image sharp and contrast-heavy, refusing to soften the supernatural into something dreamlike. The compositions frequently leave Bela looking small against the adults and spaces around her, which makes the threat feel bigger without turning every shot into an announcement of its own cleverness. Composer Patrick Jonsson fits into that same machinery, supporting the tension without making the craft feel like a collection of departments waiting for applause. I found the whole thing so damn visually pleasing, even when I was watching it between my fingers.
When a Costume Forgets How a Person Is Shaped
Production designer Jeremy Woodward and costume designer Gwen Jeffares Hourie push the visual imagination even further. Other Mommy’s clothes aren’t simply draped over the creature. They’re part of the mimicry. As the imitation slips, sleeves stretch, patterns shift and the fabric begins merging with whatever is underneath. The scariest thing is sometimes watching a costume forget how a person is shaped.
The creature work has weight because Savage starts with practical effects wherever possible and lets visual effects build on top of them. Prosthetics, contortion, makeup and performers with wildly different physicalities allow Other Mommy to evolve without turning into a generic CG ghoul. Even one elaborate upside-down environment was physically rebuilt for the camera instead of being handed off to a green screen. The result is a movie where the ingenuity is visible, but it rarely feels like Savage is nudging you in the ribs to admire it.
Growing Up Is Its Own Horror Story
More than anything, Other Mommy has something underneath all that screaming. It’s about innocence, how precious it is, how much it hurts to lose and how helpless a parent can feel watching it disappear on a schedule nobody chose. You don’t find that idea explored this thoughtfully in many American horror films. Guillermo del Toro has been working this territory for years, using fantasy and monsters to explore what children understand long before they have the words to explain it. Savage brings some of that emotional weight into a movie still determined to scare the hell out of us.
Other Mommy is what a child’s subconscious does with dysfunction and the secrets adults are certain they’re hiding well. She’s the shape unease takes when a seven-year-old doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain what she’s seeing. Bela isn’t only afraid that something in the closet wants her. She’s beginning to understand that her parents have private disappointments, failures and desires that exist beyond her, and that discovery can feel like its own betrayal. Horror has been circling motherhood hard for a few years now. This one actually has something to say about it and Savage gives the monster teeth without sacrificing the sadness that makes it frightening.
Have no fear, genre fans...
And don’t worry, horror hounds. There’s gore here that made my jaw drop. Just don’t let it distract you from how beautifully made the film is or how much attention Savage gives every element of the production. It does lose a little steam near the end, which gilds the lily one time too many, and the opening moves almost too quickly before the film settles into its rhythm. Those are flaws, but they’re small complaints against a horror movie that scared me, surprised me and gave me something to chew on afterward.
It will wind up one of the best horror films of the year for me, and one of those rare adaptations where I think the movie is better than the book. Malerman created a monster with a fantastic name. Savage gives her a face, a body and a cinematic vocabulary that could stick around. More importantly, he understands that Other Mommy isn’t frightening simply because she might come out of the closet. She’s frightening because sooner or later, every child discovers there are things about Mommy and Daddo hiding in plain sight.
Looking for something? Search for it here! Try an actor, movie, director, genre, or keyword!
Leave a Reply