Too Little Story

There are times where it feels like we’re living in a new, grand era for horror. As a genre, horror comes and goes, sliding in and easily filling the void whenever Hollywood’s “big thing” has worn out its welcome and gotten stale. This newest era of good horror has come along to give audiences something they crave – low budget productions that rely on story, characters, and gore – now that superhero films feel like they’re on the decline. Hollywood went too big, budgets became too inflated, and now we’re course correcting.

Consider some of the biggest films of the last few years, like Obsession and Sinners and Weapons. Hell, we just got the newest Resident Evil a couple of months back, and that has everyone going, “wait, a Resident Evil movie can be good?” The (un)comforting embrace of horror is bringing people back to theaters, making every gore hound in the audience happy. All you need is a good story with a solid premise and it feels like people will show up to watch. It’s a great time for the horror genre.

Which is why we really don’t need films like Other Mommy gumming up the works. Don’t get me wrong, the concept is pretty great, with a child making an “imaginary friend”, one that looks just like her mother (but creepier), only for the imaginary friend to turn out to be real, and also kind of murdery. That’s an aces concept that plays on the idea of childhood innocence and then perverts it. But Other Mommy does everything it can to squander its good ideas, burying it in an underdeveloped script that doesn’t understand how to build the world it’s creating, let alone the scare it’s trying to give us. Other Mommy is the kind of shallow, wasted potential production that makes people turn away from the theater, and this isn’t what we need while the industry is trying to find ways to lure people back.

The film, bafflingly, opens with our child protagonist, Isabella "Bella" Martin (Arabella Olivia Clark), already deep into her relationship with her “imaginary” friend, who she calls "Other Mommy" because the creature often comes to her looking like her mother. When her actual mother, Ursula Martin (Jessica Chastain), heads to the office for a long day of work (which, it’s already implied, will be made longer by an affair she’s having), it’s up to Bella’s father, Russ Martin (Jay Duplass), to be the stay-at-home parent and watch after the kiddo. He feeds her breakfast and then lets her go off to play before passing out in his office for a bit of a nap.

That’s when "Other Mommy" arrives. She wanders in, acting like she’s the actual mother, offering to make breakfast for Bella. But she can’t get things right, and she acts too pushy and needy, to the point that Bella figures out it’s her creature friend. "Other Mommy" also starts a small fire on the stove, which wakes Russ and sends him into the kitchen to put it out and clean up. But that’s when he sees "Other Mommy" as well and freaks out. Soon the monster is stalking the whole family, chasing after them everywhere they go, all with one simple demand: she wants Bella to let her into her heart so that she can “protect her always”. But it’s clear that this won’t end well for Bella.

I legitimately do not understand why the film starts when it does. Because Bella already has her creature friend, and already knows what it is, the film loses so much tension. That opening sequence where the real Ursula goes off to work and the "Other Mommy" shows up starts off tense and interesting, but that’s only because it plays on us not knowing what is going on. The second Bella understands, and reacts like this is normal, some of the tension drains off. And because Russ learns about this "Other Mommy" within ten minutes of the film starting, even more tension drains off. A good horror film slowly builds tension as it goes, but Other Mommy fails to do that at every turn.

It’s actually an abject lesson in how not to build horror because this film really doesn’t know what to do with itself once it introduces its monster. The film should have begun around the point where Bella first meets her creature, with the beast taking the form of her mother because, as we see over the course of a first act story, Ursula is never home. Bella has to crave her mother’s affection (which isn’t something she’s ever shown to do in the actual film), leaving this opening for the creature to fill. Then, throughout the second act, the creature could slowly take over Bella’s life, becoming her only friend, to the point that Bella starts ignoring everyone else, parents included. Tension would build as we steadily realize just how strange and dangerous "Other Mommy" could be, leading to the parents discovering it in the third act, prompting them to try and find a way to kill it off, all while Bella pleads for them to leave her one, true friend alone.

None of that kind of development is put in here because Other Mommy rushes to get to the “good part”, the monster, without any of the development necessary to make the story, or the characters, matter. Bella is a likable little kid, but there’s barely any real traits to her. She’s about as generic of a little girl as you could find in a Hollywood production. She’s defined more by her interactions with "Other Mommy" than via any personality written for her. Russ is slightly better, but only because Jay Duplass does what he can to sell his character’s love for his daughter. There still isn’t anything interesting about him in the script, as he’s defined solely by his desire to keep Bella safe.

Jessica Chastain, though, gets the worst of it. Ursula is a nothing character, so closed off and bottled up that Chastain can only make pinched expressions while she goes through the motions of this film. Chastain gets more to do as "Other Mommy", letting her be creepy and strange, and when the film simply relies on her to be a smiling, disturbing monster, the movie is great.. Unfortunately most of the time the film buries her under CGI effects, or has other actors play "Other Mommy", and the creature is squandered. If the film could just trust Chastain to play a creepy monster, and then let her do her thing, it would be so much better.

But in its rush to reveal the creature and get in some early scares the film sucks all the fun out of itself. We get the early reveal of "Other Mommy", and one or two jump scares, but then Russ knows what’s going on, and then Ursula finds out, and suddenly we’re rushing from place to place, doing the same thing over and over again. The parents drag Bella somewhere, then they say, “okay, now what? Are we safe this time?” Then "Other Mommy" shows up, someone dies, and the parents grab Bella and run off to a new place to ask, “okay, now what?” Over and over this is their whole plan, and you quickly realize the movie has set up a creature with no rules, and no weaknesses, and is just running on a loop because it doesn’t know how to kill the thing it has created. There’s an intellectual void at the center of the film, marked by its inability to understand anything it’s designing, and it ruins the whole experience.

Other Mommy could be a solid film if it had a different script from a different creative team that understood what kind of film they were actually making. I think the cast is solid, and they try to make what they can of this empty and hollow film, but there just isn’t anything interesting or substantive about Other Mommy for them to work with. This is the worst kind of horror film, the kind that takes a good idea and squanders it so thoroughly that you almost wish it hadn’t been made at all. This is the kind of empty, CGI slop people are trying to get away from, and it leaves a black mark on a genre that, otherwise, is seeing a new heyday. Do yourself a favor and avoid Other Mommy at all costs. It’s just not worth watching.