When—as the kids say—it’s really cooking, Nathan Elston’s screenplay for Other Mommy is governed by a truly diabolical sort of logic. The trick that this film, an adaptation of a novel by Josh Malerman, needs to pull off is to convince us that the demonic or otherwise being that has taken on the appearance of the mother and wife of a family of three is both a being that operates in a liminal or existential space and also one that has an effect upon its surrounding reality. The movie’s best set pieces do just that, and it’s sort of difficult to figure out what the centerpiece of those sequences might be.
The closest we might get is a sojourn to a local mall, where the playplace for kids is stationed directly beside an indoor food court at which the central family, the Martins, have arrived to eat after quite a lot of traumatizing activity. It’s good to unwind in certain circumstances, and witnessing the violent death (a phrase that is putting it lightly) of a family friend at the hands of a monstrous vision of pure terror is an understandable catalyst for such a desire. Of course, the being isn’t done with this family yet, so we watch, in impressed horror, as a slide tube becomes an endless hallway with too many detours and the ball pit opens toward what might as well be Hell itself.
Maybe, though, it’s the hinted-at scene right before it, when the family seeks refuge with that family friend, following a dinner party gone wrong, and only puts him in far, far more jeopardy than even they have been in so far. Perhaps it’s the dinner party, where the threat of the “other mommy” becomes more than just a threat to the Martin family, consisting of a mom (Jessica Chastain), a daddo (Jay Duplass), and their put-upon daughter Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark). In this critic’s mind, though, the centerpiece comes later than all of these, after we’ve gotten a sense of how this monster works and once the screenplay has arrived at the obligatory scene of explanation and attempted exorcism.
It’s a deviously amusing sequence, not only because of what happens in it but also because director Rob Savage completely bulldozes over our expectations by following through on an entirely different idea. This is the part where the family, pushed to the brink by all that is happening, just wants to get rid of the thing, and so, of course, they find help from mom Ursula’s own mother (played by Karen Allen) and a small team of paranormal experts (Dichen Lachman plays the main one) who also know a little something about how to expel spirits. The problem for everyone—but especially the experts—is that this really isn’t what they hastily explain it could be, and their method of finding this out is punctual, grotesque and genuinely, hilariously shocking.
This is all an act of subversion on the parts of Elston and Savage, but the sad truth of the matter is that this is also kind of the last act of true subversion that is present here. The simple and straightforward plot has Ursula, Bela and dad Russ practically sprinting from possible escape route to possible escape route as the real nature of this “other mommy” stares everyone, including those in the audience, right in the face. It might not be the one thing they sort of assumed upon realizing that their house was under attack from some unknown and hostile spirit, but it’s definitely the other thing, which obviously won’t be mentioned specifically here.
If a movie was merely its parts—which, in this case, would be its many scare-filled sequences, most of which follow through on that devious forward logic—this one might have resonated as genuinely terrifying, darkly funny and, ultimately, quite affecting, as the nature of the alternate mother is made known to us. As a whole experience, though, the film is slightly underwhelming in the way it constantly pushes off the inevitable, slightly anticlimactic, rather confused reveal for a chaotic climax that just seems to be making it up as it goes along.
For the actors’ part, Clark is put through the wringer and holds her own rather nicely through all the business, while Duplass wisely takes on a role that is both funny and sweet by not completely giving in to the funny parts. Obviously, Chastain delights in playing both versions of Mommy, with her creepy smile and empty crying eyes and the willingness to go all the way with the bits of physicality (which are sometimes also just straight-up physical comedy, like when the being folds its body into a pretzel for no apparent reason). She might be even better, though, as a mother and a wife with a pair of secrets to make her emotionally vulnerable during all this mess, too.
The movie has a heart, then, but that heart is overtaken by the geek-show of horror in the climax, which not only undermines the human story but also sort of contradicts the internal logic of the monster and its presence in reality—in one scene transporting its young heroine from the ball pit to the inside of a car in plain view of passersby and, by the end, adopting an entirely different nature just to fuel a bit of emotional catharsis. Other Mommy is quite creepy at its best, but in some important ways, it doesn’t quite play fair.
Rating: **½ (out of ****)
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