Other Mommy Is a 90-Minute Trailer Looking for a Movie

I wanted to like Other Mommy. The trailer is creepy, the premise has potential, and Jessica Chastain playing a mother who may or may not be a demonic entity is the sort of setup that should at least produce a memorable nightmare.

Instead, the movie feels like someone made a great opening scene, forgot to write the rest, then used CGI to fill the silence.

The title is also Other Mommy, which bothers me more than it should. Other Mother rhymes. It sounds cleaner. It makes sense. But since the story is told partly from a little girl’s perspective, I suppose we have to accept that she isn’t going to start calling this thing “Other Mother” while hanging out in the Nexus with Jean-Luc Picard.

A good premise trapped in a bad movie

The setup is simple enough. A family is dealing with an entity that has attached itself to their daughter. This demon wants to experience human life, and it takes the form of the girl’s mother while trying to convince the child to surrender herself willingly.

When that doesn’t work, the entity resorts to fear. It scares the girl, isolates her, and generally makes the family’s life miserable until trust becomes impossible.

That could work. A small, personal horror story about a family being manipulated from the inside has plenty of room for tension. The best version of this movie would have stayed close to the family, made the entity feel present but unknowable, and forced everyone to question what they were seeing.

Other Mommy has no interest in that version.

The opening scene is easily the strongest part of the film. It has atmosphere, tension, and a clear sense that something is wrong. It also happens to be the scene you have probably already seen if you watched the trailer. That is the problem. The movie begins with the only sequence that feels genuinely scary, then spends the remaining runtime trying to convince you that the same energy is still there.

It isn’t.

The trailer promised a horror movie

I understand that a trailer is a sales pitch. It will show you the best-looking footage, rearrange the context, and hide the scenes that would make you reconsider spending money on a ticket.

But Other Mommy made me feel catfished.

The beginning has tension. The rest has scenes. Those are not the same thing.

There is a paranormal investigator sequence that I enjoyed, even though it feels like it wandered in from another movie. The tone keeps changing depending on which idea the film wants to try next. One minute it is attempting to be an intimate family drama. Then it is a monster movie. Then it is making room for a bloody kill that feels completely disconnected from the story around it.

The individual pieces are occasionally interesting. The movie never figures out how to assemble them.

One sequence involves the girl being teleported out of a ball pit, with all the balls following her through the transition. It is a cool image. I will give it that. But it also made me wonder whether I was watching a soft reboot of Jumper. The only difference is that instead of water following someone through a teleportation jump, it is a child and an entire ball pit.

I have questions. None of them are helping the movie.

Bigger is not scarier

The entity is at its least effective when the film finally shows too much of it. We get large CGI creatures with glowing eyes, chasing people around and killing them in ways that feel designed for a much louder, more generic movie.

There is a basic horror principle that Other Mommy keeps ignoring: less is usually more.

A monster does not become frightening because it gets bigger. It becomes frightening when the audience can imagine it standing just outside the frame. A strange shape in the dark can work. A figure that moves incorrectly can work. A thing that appears in the wrong place at the wrong time can work.

A giant digital creature with glowing eyes mostly makes me think about the effects budget.

At one point, I found myself thinking about Batman Begins. The fear toxin nightmare sequence with Batman’s glowing eyes is more unsettling than anything this demon does. That is a rough comparison for a horror movie to lose.

The film also has a few overproduced effects sequences that would make more sense in a different story. The teleportation, the monsters, the elaborate kills—none of it fits the smaller family drama the premise seems to be promising. Other Mommy should have been personal and contained. Instead, it keeps escalating until the emotional center disappears.

The family drama never earns the finale

Eventually, the movie tries to bring everything back around and hit you in the feelings. It wants the ending to land as a painful emotional payoff about family, fear, and the damage caused by this entity.

I felt nothing.

The film spends so much time kicking the audience in the patience that it has no emotional credit left by the time it asks for sympathy. You cannot spend the entire movie making the characters feel like pieces being moved from one disconnected scene to another, then expect the final act to suddenly make me care about what happens to them.

The child performance does some heavy lifting, and Arabella Olivia Frank gives the story a believable center. Chastain also brings more commitment than the material deserves, especially when she gets to play with the creepy physical mannerisms of the entity. But neither performance can solve the basic writing problem.

The characters are not given enough consistent logic to make their fear feel contagious. The family reacts to events because the plot needs them to react, not because the movie has carefully built a believable chain of cause and effect.

That is why the ending feels less tragic than exhausted.

Final take

Other Mommy has the bones of a solid horror movie. The opening works. A few concepts are genuinely cool. There are flashes of a better, smaller film buried underneath all the CGI and tonal whiplash.

Unfortunately, those flashes are buried very deep.

This should have been a tense family story about an entity quietly replacing the person everyone trusts most. Instead, it becomes a collection of horror scenes that never develop into a movie. The trailer sells dread. The feature delivers noise.

Remember: when your opening scene is the only part of the movie with tension, you did not make a horror film. You made a trailer that ran too long.

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