'Other Mommy' Review: A Bizarre Horror Mess That's Somehow Never Dull
By Dan Bremner - October 16, 2026
The new horror outing from Rob Savage, based on the 2024 novel Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman. It follows Bela, an eight-year-old girl living in a home full of marital problems, as she confronts a sinister entity that comes out of her closet. The presence, whom she calls “Other Mommy,” becomes increasingly threatening to her and her family.
Despite being one of the worst-reviewed theatrically-released horror films of the year, Other Mommy still managed to take me by surprise, just not always in a good way. This turned out to be one of the most baffling, messy and insane horror films of the year. One so stupid it genuinely has to be seen to be believed. There’s never a dull moment, but it’s almost inept on every single level. I left the cinema equal parts entertained and completely bewildered. Not entirely sure what I had witnessed.
Jessica Chastain’s dual performance is the clear highlight and the thing most people will be talking about. She plays both the workaholic real mother Ursula and the sinister, shape-shifting “Other Mommy” entity, and she goes at it with full commitment. There’s demented energy, some unsettling smiles, physical contortions and a willingness to lean hard into the freakiness and camp of the monster role. Watching an Oscar winner throw herself into the horror antics like this is a treat. It’s a tour-de-force of parental adoration gone completely wrong, and she’s clearly having a blast even when the film around her is a baffling mess.
Arabella Olivia Clark as young Bela is the other strong point. The child actress delivers a naturalistic, captivating and empathetic turn as the lonely, perceptive child at the centre of it all. She’s fantastic, a real discovery, and acts as the film’s emotional anchor, carrying a surprising amount of the film on her small shoulders. The material she is given ultimately makes no sense and the choices they make with her arc are truly insane, but she does the best with the material she is given.
Other Mommy moves at a fast, energetic pace and clocks in at a tight-90. It has rollercoaster momentum and a sort of hallucinatory haunted-house energy that keeps things from ever becoming boring, even when the scares themselves vary wildly in effectiveness. It’s the kind of film that could work as a loud Friday-night outing with friends purely because it refuses to sit still. It packs incidents in quickly and doesn’t linger too long on setup. It genuinely feels like if the film stops moving, it will blow up, like the bus in Speed.
One small mercy is the early acceptance of the supernatural. Unlike so many similar films that waste half an hour on the “it’s just the child’s imagination” routine, the parents (especially Jay Duplass as the father) encounter the entity and accept its reality within minutes. That at least lets the story move forward instead of spinning its wheels, even if it is at the expense of anything given time to breathe or feel even half-developed.
Karen Allen brings some welcome presence as the grandmother with occult interests, and the Blumhouse/Atomic Monster (James Wan) production delivers polished production design, and intense sound design (the opening titles are an assault on the senses). Rob Savage also throws in some creative visual and stylistic choices of gliding camera work, reflections, offscreen space and sudden shifts in location or scale that heighten the tension in moments and make the film feel a bit freer than standard haunted-house or imaginary-friend fare.
And then the problems start piling up. The story and mythology are thin and half-baked. The plot is flimsy, underdeveloped and lacking any real originality. The adaptation of Malerman’s novel feels like it cherry-picked the wrong elements, rushed through exposition and offered only the briefest, most unsatisfactory explanations for what the entity actually is. The family secrets and marital tension are handled so awfully, complete with a head-scratching finale that almost had me in shock by how it was handled.
The thematic handling of motherhood, parental regret and family dysfunction is undercooked at best and borderline problematic at worst. There’s an odd “anti-mommy” undercurrent and a warped sense of the material that never thoughtfully explores the consequences of emotional absence. Any positive messages about honesty and pain feel half-baked and constantly undercut by the insane execution, making for something deeply misguided. Almost in a commendable way.
Unfortunately, while there's strong, boldly coloured visuals, including a never-ending child's tunnel and upside down living rooms, they are repeatedly undercut by some truly terrible CGI. The distorted face of Other Mommy can sometimes resemble a melting Michael Jackson who’s been left in a sauna for several hours too long. It’s the kind of digital work that yanks you straight out of the moment and reminds you you’re watching a mid-budget studio horror that couldn’t quite afford to make its big creature effects convincing.
The rushed pacing is a double-edged sword. While the 93-minute runtime keeps things moving, it also means the film speed runs plot points, character arcs and thematic ideas. It never develops deep attachments or allows space for the family drama and the child’s loneliness to land with any real impact. Everything is just happening too quickly for any of it to matter. I can't emphasise just how much this film refuses to settle down. If you leave the cinema to go to the toilet, you will miss about three or four plot beats and locations by the time you've sat back down. It truly feels like there's about 45-minutes of this film that was left on the cutting room floor.
Once the “Other Mommy’s" (And don't you worry, characters are saying the title of this film all over the place. They quickly accept and take to calling it the “Other Mommy”) powers expand without any clear limits. She delves into teleportation, reality-warping, size changes, the works, and the threat loses all grounding and becomes exhausting rather than frightening. A “monster without limits” approach just grows fatiguing over the runtime. You stop feeling any threat and start wondering what ridiculous new ability it’s going to pull out next.
Other Mommy is a baffling, messy and frequently inept horror film that somehow remains never dull thanks to Jessica Chastain’s all-in dual performance, a strong turn from young Arabella Olivia Clark, and its frantic, short runtime. The jump-scare overkill, paper-thin mythology, rushed emotional beats and limitless monster that just becomes tiring stop it from ever coming together into something coherent or actually scary. It’s so stupid it's a must-see, but seeing it doesn’t make it any less of a bizarre mess.
'Other Mommy' is out now in cinemas following its release on October 9, 2026.
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Dan Bremner
Writer
Dan is a writer from Guildford with a love for all things genre, schlocky, and thoroughly '80s, and a part-time philanthropist.
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