Directed By Rob Savage

Starring – Jessica Chastain, Arabella Olivia Clark, Jay Duplass

The Plot – Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), an 8-year-old girl living in a home with marital problems, confronts a sinister entity which comes out of her closet. The presence, whom she calls “Other Mommy,” becomes increasingly threatening to her and her family.

Rated R for some bloody violence, and adult language.

Other Mommy | Official Trailer

POSITIVES

As exhausted and annoyed as I was by one of the year’s most egregiously aggressive marketing campaigns, there’s ample evidence of the unforeseen ambition to the movie’s execution that echoes the magnified level of confidence that Atomic Monster Productions had in its finished product, beginning with the cerebrally profound screenplay from Nathan Elston, which contorts itself into something unexpectedly original from my preconceived expectations. Without spoiling anything thematically that pertains to the movie’s overarching conflict, I will instead convey that it becomes painfully evident from the opening first few sequences that something deeper and more meaningful is transpiring just beneath the surface of this family’s tumultuous tryst with an unrelenting and uncompromisable entity that stalks their child daughter, with everything from the invader’s visual likeness to its interaction with Bela stirring the sentimental stew for what’s to eventually come, and while this boldly unexpected direction threatens to divide audience interests directly down the middle, as a result of the film that they were previously expecting to see, I will say that for me personally, the ambition allows it to stand out more significantly than it possibly ever could’ve with its advertised diversion, allowing me to relate so much more emotionally and empathetically to these characters and their corresponding conflict because of facing so much of what Bela is enduring from such an early age in my life. I also appreciated that Elston deviates away from an overwhelming majority of conventionalized tropes that predictably telegraph so many of the vital beats of these movies under one umbrella, such as one distinct decision to establish early on that all three of the family members are in on the knowledge of Other Mommy’s existence, allowing the script to avoid polarizing Bela as psychologically ailing in the way her parents and other periodic outsiders see her. This aforementioned creative shift is matched and emulated seamlessly by some vital components to the filmmaking that make for one of the more fascinatingly unique and compelling presentations that I’ve seen all year, particularly within the editing and production designs, that vividly bring to life a nightmarish world of surrealism, where Other Mommy feels inescapable by her accessible reach extending far beyond the limits of the family’s household, making it difficult to evade, let alone slow her down with any kind of success. While the intricacies of the sets truly help flesh out an ominously dreadful underlining atmosphere that would make Freddy Krueger shriek with joy from all of extensiveness of these manipulated environments, the real show-stealer is in the absorbing techniques of the editing, which bleed from one scene to the next spontaneously like a series of dreams with no contextual footing to the randomness of where the storytelling constantly takes us, and while this might make it sound a bit choppy or disjointing to the channeled complexities of its methods, I never felt like I was losing my grasp on the interpretability of the product because of its unwavering randomness, instead appraising endless respect for the artistry of this production, for how it crafts meticulous detail to even the most scattered environmental elements between stages, without anything to the dialogue assisting the audience in effectively putting all of the pieces together to the film’s bigger picture. Beyond everything previously praised, the film is also helmed sturdily by Rob Savage, whose deliberately disorienting direction not only makes it difficult to attain a graspable grip on the realities of what’s taking shape, but also makes the aforementioned all-encompassing dread of this family feel every bit inevitable as it is inescapable. Savage’s single most meaningful component is basing the consistency of the story from Bela’s perspective, as a desire of tapping into the vulnerability of child protagonists that movie of this caliber often overlook, and though some of his decisions ultimately detract away from the consistency of frights, I do feel that the conflict taps into the vulnerability instilled from a character who doesn’t trust as easily as you would expect from child protagonists, in turn advocating a star-making performance from Arabella Olivia Clark, to which so much of the movie’s empathetic emotionality rests heavily on her stoic shoulders. Clark’s naturalistic and captivating screen presence goes a long way in generating the movie’s only real tension, without any semblance of precociousness condemning either the air of her authenticity or even the tenderness of her compassionate vulnerability, and though Clark works against the wind of a double dose of Jessica Chastain, an Oscar-winning actress in her own right, the little girl more than holds her own, both dramatically and resiliently, paving the road for a promising future that all started with an effortless approach here that feels anything but simple. Speaking of Chastain, the grizzled screen veteran dependably emits the dimensionality of her dual performance with enough emotional versatility that makes these sides easily distinguishable from one another, where Chastain’s detached sensibilities as the overwhelmed mother of this struggling household are balanced by the heightened melodramatic flair of the movie’s demonic entity, providing a wide range of expressionism that confirms her adaptability in any genre that she chooses.

NEGATIVES

While there’s more about Other Mommy that I respected more than I enjoyed, there are still those few condemning factors that ultimately and unfortunately keep from cementing an audience of its own, beginning with the lack of crucial scares, that become tediously exhausting more than frighteningly stimulating, as a result of Savage’s heavy reliance on cheaply telegraphed jump scares. Considering this movie wastes no time establishing the perimeters of the conflict, an aspect in itself that has compromising issues to the approachability of these characters, we’re quickly overwhelmed by as many as three jarring jolts transpiring within the movie’s opening ten minutes, and never relent throughout the documented fifty jump scares that are evoked extraneously throughout the film’s duration, and considering a majority of them are nothing more than abrasive sound designs for impacts that don’t justify the extent of maximized volume and intrusive editing techniques, it leaves each opportunity extinguished by its ever-increasing dependency on them, where even the most timidly tender audiences shouldn’t feel tested by scares so sloppily executed. Those last few descriptive verbs bring me to the movie’s utilizing of some truly odd special effects work, where jarringly laughable CGI physical contortions of characters look uncanny to the creepy atmosphere that the movie is deliberately trying to project for itself, misfiring on all cylinders towards an established tone that is enacted too sternly serious to ever coincide harmlessly with this artificial imagery. In a lot of ways, it makes the material and direction feel disjointed from one another, where Savage feels one way about the material, while the evidence in the footage feels completely different, and though some of this inevitably pertains to the uniquely creative idea that remains somewhere in the distance of audience expectations, even afterwards it fails to muster up enough cohesion in consistency to feel like one collective vision, where the film isn’t funny or scary enough to find a comfortable consistency to either category, leaving so much of the material leaning one-dimensionally towards monotony on all measurable accounts. If this isn’t enough, some of the motivations and irresponsible actions of the supporting characters feel far too audacious to materialize honestly or appropriately out of its characters, requiring much more empathetic allure from Arabella Olivia Clark, who is somehow both the smartest and youngest character in the film. This is not to say that youthful protagonists cannot be intelligent, but rather that their parents should shoulder some of the responsibility of keeping their family safe, and between Chastain’s Ursula feeling preoccupied by outsider elements to the familial household, and Duplass’ Daddo being a plundered pushover, there’s little dependability to keep Bela safe, where even the big reveal during the third act did little to redeem these adults with any sense of nobility. Not that the opening act fares better in this regard, with generating momentum, as it feels like the movie begins with the narrative feeling already in progress, requiring the audience to catch up with on-the-nose exposition from the dialogue playing from behind. As previously established, the bigger picture takes care of some of this reasoning, as the conflict essentially manifests itself long before we’ve been brought into the fold of this family’s established history, but because the film fails to clue us into these characters with any semblance of backstory or development, until the moment at the end of the second act where it absolutely requires it, our attainable investment towards them takes a bit longer to manifest than ever expected, leaving the finished product of the film’s first half feeling more like two second acts, instead of one that patiently lays out everything that we can interpret for ourselves.

OVERALL
Other Mommy is neither the film that we expected, nor the one that we deserved, with Rob Savage enacting a firm dependency for cheap jump scares and cringeworthy CGI, that unfortunately leaves its tonal tenacity cooked by an unrealized vision of a finished product. While not terribly irredeemable, as the profound deeper meaning contextualizes so much of the disorienting haziness that we’re interpreting in real time, the film is still void of the nurturing and providing presence required to compel an impressionable audience, cementing one of the year’s most ambitious and perplexing finished products living under the same roof.

My Grade: 5.8 or C-