OTHER MOMMY (2026)

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Director: Rob Savage
Cast: Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass, Arabella Olivia Clark, Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed, Karen Allen
Runtime: 1 hr 33 mins
Rating: M18 (Some Violence and Gore)
Released By: UIP
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 8 October 2026

Synopsis: From James Wan, one of the most influential architects of modern horror behind the Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises—and Rob Savage, the director of bold genre films Host and The Boogeyman, comes a terrifying trip into the darkening world of a young girl, Bela, who forms a relationship with a sinister entity in her home who looks uncannily like her own mother. 

Movie Review:

Every now and then, we are reminded that an intriguing conceit does not a good movie make. Other Mommy is a particularly frustrating example. It comes with pedigree, all right: Jessica Chastain in dual roles, James Wan producing under the Blumhouse Atomic Monster banner, and a premise that promises to turn a child’s most reassuring relationship into something monstrous. Those expecting a chilling otherworldly horror, however, should prepare for disappointment. There is considerably more imagination in the setup than in what follows.

For starters, the film skips the buildup. Seven-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) is already familiar with the entity lurking in her bedroom closet, which assumes the appearance of her mother, Ursula (Chastain). We are told this “Other Mommy” has been a welcome companion, but encounter her when her demands are becoming sinister. She wants Bela to let her into her heart. Before long, both parents have seen the creature too. Mystery is off the table almost immediately.

Naturally, all is not well beneath this family’s apparently comfortable exterior. Ursula prioritises her career, leaving most of the parenting to her husband, Russ (Jay Duplass), and her absences conceal an affair. Here lies the film’s most promising idea: Other Mommy could embody both the attentive mother Bela wishes she had and the anxiety she cannot articulate about her parents’ deteriorating marriage. A familiar face becoming frightening ought to mean something to a child discovering that adults keep secrets.

Unfortunately, director Rob Savage and screenwriter Nathan Elston, adapting Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, barely explore these possibilities. Rather than develop Bela’s shifting understanding of her mother, they keep devising new ways for the monster to interrupt proceedings. There is also something dispiritingly simplistic about associating Ursula’s professional ambitions with maternal failure. Her flaws should complicate the family portrait, not provide a convenient explanation for why something nasty has moved into the closet.

Instead, we get a succession of elaborate setpieces involving distorted spaces, contorted bodies and jump scares. A children’s play area, complete with ball pit, becomes another supernatural obstacle course. The camera keeps circling characters to reveal something unpleasant behind them, a trick that loses its surprise through repetition. Some of these excursions into warped surroundings feel borrowed from Insidious. You start wondering whether Savage is also auditioning to direct its next instalment.

Even judged purely as a scare machine, the film is shallow. Wan understood in The Conjuring that a jump scare needs preparation: the unease beforehand, the uncertainty about where to look, the dreadful anticipation of something appearing. Here, another grotesque apparition is seldom far away, and the constant escalation leaves little room for suspense. Making Chastain’s face stranger does not automatically make the scene scarier.

The plotting hardly helps. Other Mommy can move people and objects through space, but exercises these abilities whenever the screenplay finds it convenient. Her sudden impatience to possess Bela is similarly underexplained. Meanwhile, the parents discover a monster threatening their daughter and still proceed with an anniversary party. Apparently, supernatural emergencies are no reason to disappoint the guests. Such absurdities make it difficult to take either the danger or the family’s reactions seriously.  

A detour involving Ursula’s estranged mother, Ruth (Karen Allen), is especially pointless. Her interest in the supernatural supplies a team of ghost investigators, sending the film into another familiar confrontation rather than illuminating the troubled relationships between its three generations. Later, family secrets become ammunition against the entity, but these revelations arrive without the dramatic groundwork they need. The movie suddenly wants us to feel the weight of a marriage it has barely bothered to examine.

A quiet exchange between Bela and Russ, framed through a gap in large building blocks, briefly suggests the intimate, unsettling family drama this could have been. Then the film is off chasing yet another noisy supernatural distraction.

Through all this, Clark is the strongest reason to remain engaged. She gives Bela a vulnerability that makes her attachment to the creature understandable and her growing fear affecting. It is a substantial burden for a young performer, and she anchors the film more convincingly than her adult co-stars. Chastain certainly commits, but neither her fraught mother nor her grinning double becomes especially compelling; Duplass’s goofy affability often seems imported from a different film. Clark deserves a story that develops her performance rather than repeatedly interrupting it.

Ultimately, Other Mommy reinforces a worrying sense of declining quality in Wan’s production stable. After disappointments such as Night Swim, another promising premise has been reduced to familiar tricks, with too little attention paid to the people supposedly giving those tricks meaning. The result is limp, ineffectual horror that neither unsettles as a nightmare nor satisfies as a family drama. As for a sequel, let us hope the producers resist. One Other Mommy is already one too many.

Movie Rating:

(Other Mommy squanders an intriguing premise and a talented young lead on tired jump scares and shallow family drama, leaving little to fear or remember)

Review by Gabriel Chong