A New Wave track is among the better ways to open a film, and the first thing we hear in Other Mommy is Haircut 100’s Boy Meets Girl. Encouraging, but this Blumhouse horror quickly loses its way.
We meet Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), an articulate 8-year-old girl living with her father Russ (Jay Duplass), a kindly but unkempt househusband, and her mother Ursula (Jessica Chastain), a rather severe, angular presence who clearly pays the bills. The film does not labour this point. Russ’s scruffy hair and Ursula’s elegant corporate outfits make it clear. Her impatient lack of respect does the rest.
But anyway, this is Other Mommy, not Ordinary People, and director Rob Savage dulls your senses with an exhausting succession of maximalist set pieces concerning the titular Other Mommy, who is identical to Ursula and appears in Bela’s bedroom with a creepy smile on her face. After much eyeballing and ominous requests to ‘go into her heart’, Other Mommy returns at all times of day with a sunken face and twisting, arachnid limbs. This means she’s definitely a baddie, and Russ and Ursula take increasingly drastic measures to evade her, which proves difficult.
Little Bela is thrown through a number of surrealist locales, each one more elaborate and tedious than the last, including an infinity crawl tube, a ball pit that somehow manifests in the family car and Bela’s bedroom, and a high-tech exorcism hosted by a cocky girl boss in a wood-clad mansion.
After all that, it’s surprising that Other Mommy cost only $20 million, because the film looks good — too good. This is a polished production that chooses spectacle over suspense and subtlety. In Paranormal Activity, you dread the demon’s next sinister encroachment. In Other Mommy, you’ve already seen her in the trailer. Every jump, distortion and grotesquerie after that barely registers; you’re left with a film that’s not just pedestrian, but ridiculous, too.
The family’s battle against Other Mommy is absurd — what the hell is going on here? An 8-year-old girl’s imaginary friend is real and bloody dangerous? That could work, but not after such relentless exposure. An emotional reveal attempts to ground this nonsense in the family’s broken dynamic, but Other Mommy has long shot its bolt by then.
