Jessica Chastain plucks malevolently on her apron strings in a dual role as both goodie and baddie in this one-line pitch of a horror movie about a mother fighting off a supernatural being who competes for her young daughter’s attention by taking on her appearance.
The tale is told very much from the child’s point of view, initially toying with the notion that it’s all in her fertile imagination; she is only seven, after all. Most interesting are the handful of uncanny dream sequences recalling (but never yielding to) the pop surrealism of a Nightmare On Elm Street film.
The bland production design and naturalistic performances establish that this could be any ordinary but unlucky family – the Freelings in Poltergeist leap to mind as if by some unseen force, as do the MacNeils in The Exorcist. But this film’s makeshift attempts at human warmth feel about as convincing as those of the evil entity itself.
Director Rob Savage instructs his camera operator to creep around this cosy domestic space like an intruder, keeping the characters hidden in the ample shadows, to the accompaniment of ominous rumbles and eardrum-perforating thuds on the soundtrack. Flashy editing choices try to liven up the otherwise dreary visual scheme, but they’re just wasting their lipstick on this metaphorical pig.
The violence is sudden, gory and sometimes spectacular, but it’s so unearthly that there’s no sense of gorehound satisfaction in watching it. Besides, these scenes are (like much of the movie) so poorly lit that you can barely register its neck-breaking nods to John Carpenter’s The Thing in the first place.
Things pick up a bit when the family relocates to the primeval coastal abode of the girl’s grandma (Karen Allen, desperately in need of a new agent), a medium who swiftly assembles a ghostbusting super-team that delights in dealing with a legitimate phenomenon, only to meet the same fate as the proverbial curious cat.
In between bursts of decidedly un-horrific horror, the actors get the odd moment to suggest a trendy subtext of unprocessed trauma, but these trails of breadcrumbs don’t lead anywhere fulfilling. There are, however, sniggers to be had from the awkwardness of some of their social interactions. Whether those are intentional or not is for your conscience to decide.
Chastain’s titular doppelgänger is introduced early, delivering her lines with the counterfeit sincerity of a Stepford wife, telling the poor haunted nipper exactly what she wants to hear, because her real mommy is disappointingly human and fallible.
It’s an idea with a lot of thematic and dramatic potential, but it’s squandered on cheesy, CGI-assisted jump scares contorting Chastain’s rictus grin into that of a melting mannequin. A slower, more ambiguous burn might have suited the story better.
Arabella Olivia Clark exudes strong regular-kid energy, but like her onscreen mum she’s wasted on such lame, schematic and unimaginative material. There are so many avenues down which we could explore the depths of her unformed psychology, but instead the film cleaves to the middle of the road.
Other Mommy dives straight into the deep end of its macabre premise with a lack of restraint that could be great fun in a more lurid and theatrical kind of movie. But it hedges its bets by striving for that middlebrow, 15-rated, A24 realism when it might have been better off going full Ari Aster or, for Chastain at any rate, full Joan Crawford. What we’ve actually got is neither scary nor entertaining.
-Stew Mott-
