Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, delivered one of the best trailers of the year. I’m not sure I’ll ever witness the amount of screaming and jumping I did from this singular movie promo. However, the trailer may have been the last time fans experienced a scare from Other Mommy.
As of now, the film currently sits at a 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Dare I say, that score is too low?
Jessica Chastain’s portrayal of the duality of Ursula’s journey through motherhood is electrifying. On one hand, you have a mother pretending to be content with the family she has built. On the other, you have “Other Mommy,” a supernatural entity so hellbent on receiving her daughter’s love that she is willing to eliminate any obstacle standing in her way. I’m not even kidding right now, you guys, I’ve thought about that weird smile she delivers at least a hundred times since watching this.
Rob Savage’s keen eye for horror takes the spotlight during the film’s horror sequences. Seemingly drawing inspiration from Stephen King’s IT, the supernatural entity haunts our young protagonist by becoming psychological, evasive, infiltrating her sense of safety, and blurring the lines between imagination and reality. One of the sequences that genuinely frightened me was watching Bella fall into a ball pit that opens up into a seemingly endless, pitch-black abyss. (Mainly because this was a very real childhood fear of mine. You know, back when ball pits still existed.)
The missing piece of the puzzle for me was the ending. It felt lazy and gimmicky. I mean… come on. There’s nothing I hate more than a cheap ending in which confronting the truth magically resolves everything. In Other Mommy, Ursula’s revelation about Bella’s biological father somehow becomes the key to banishing the entity that’s been terrorizing their family. Really?
While the scares didn’t quite deliver to the hype the trailer summoned, Other Mommy, was still an entertaining horror film bringing inspiration from IT and Coraline.
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