Other Mommy review
How much Blum is in this house?
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Other Mommy
Directed by Rob Savage
Screenplay by Nathan Elston
Starring Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass and Arabella Olivia Clark
Other Mommy Review
Let’s get a few things off our proverbial chest before starting this review of Other Mommy. First…no, it should not be titled Other Mother. Yes, I am aware that those words rhyme. No, it is not what the title of the movie should be. Set aside any childish love of rhyming patterns for a moment and think it through. “Mommy” is the adorable word a small child uses to refer to their mother. Using it in a horror movie about a twisted version of that parental guardian makes for an effective use of both emotion and personal attachment while telling you exactly the perspective you need to understand. “Mother” rhymes with “Other”. That’s all it does. Kids don’t call their mom’s “mother”. It’s impersonal as a point. So, stop it with that nonsense. Been annoying since the trailer dropped.
The trailer drop is the next bit of business. If you went to theaters to see The Odyssey you remember the trailer for Other Mommy. It ruffled some feathers by having a genuinely effective jump scare. A delight for horror fans…sure…but attached to a giant mainstream hit movie…well…it bothered the normies. I thought it was a very effective piece of business, that trailer. It got itself out in front of people who wouldn’t look for it and gave them a real scare. Of course…many complained about it but that really only made it more fun. Obviously, Other Mommy got in front of all those eyes because it shares a distribution company with Christopher Nolan’s epic. So…kudos to them for making everyone watch it. That kind of thing gives you some hope that Universal knows they have a good movie on their hands. Also, The Odyssey was using horror concepts anyway.
Which brings us to the final elephant in the room. Universal Pictures may be distributing Other Mommy…but it is a Blumhouse production. If you have any taste you know what that has meant for several years now. Blumhouse makes some terrible movies. Popular movies, sure. But bad. Commercially successful movies? Yes. But largely unwatchable to anyone with the slightest horror palate.
So, we head once more into the breach to see if this will be the Blumhouse production to finally deliver something better than “well…it wasn’t as bad as the last one”. Jessica Chastain is here…and she’s really good…maybe this will be the one. It’s also rated R which certainly gives it a better chance than the PG-13 Blumhouse cookie cutter factory of family friendly horror they’ve peddled for far too long now. So, is Other Mommy that long awaited one?
No. It’s terrible.
At this point I almost want to credit Blumhouse for finding new ways to make such bad movies. Sure, they all look the same…but Other Mommy invents new ways to make you want to scratch your head. That creepiness from the trailer? Well enjoy watching that scene play out again in the full feature because it’s all of that style you’re going to get. Other Mommy throws a hundred bad ideas against the wall to see if anything sticks…and my god does it ever not stick. This feels like ideas for multiple movies just sewed together into one maddeningly awful one. Again, to the point where not understanding why choices are made somehow becomes the best thing about the movie itself.
It’s impossible for me to describe the feeling of watching Other Mommy in a way that’s going to make sense to someone who hasn’t’ seen it. But imagine being bored out of your mind while the most random and absurd things happen on screen. At every level of it. The plot, the characters, the visuals…it’s like someone wrote everything they could think of on a whiteboard and then challenged themselves to put it all into one script. Scenes just…happen. You won’t feel anything towards them, nor will you understand why many of them are happening. But they happen. Which means this is technically a movie. Hooray.
Any chance that Chastain’s creepy doppelganger will be an effective antagonist goes out the window almost immediately when the CGI effects take hold. And that’s before the story itself goes out of its way to make the entity’s screentime more befuddling than scary. There are some jump scares that might work on someone watching their first ever horror movie…which speaks to the larger Blumhouse problem.
For many years now it feels like Blumhouse has been catering specifically to people who have never seen a horror movie. When M3GAN became a surprise smash they ran as far away from the genre as they could and destroyed their own franchise. Because after years of boring killer swimming pools, nonsense AI antagonist movies and whatever the hell is supposed to be scary about the Five Nights at Freddy’s movies…it’s time to face the truth. Blumhouse hates horror. Or, at least, they see it as nothing more than a selling point to line their pockets while producing horror movies that hate themselves. Don’t believe me? Think back to the last good movie Blumhouse produced. It was a remake of a movie from only a couple of years ago called Speak No Evil. And it stripped out all of the horror from the original to deliver a happy ending instead. Blumhouse hates horror. And horror fans need to stop supporting them.
A good place to begin would be ignoring that Other Mommy has come out at all. You’ll save yourself an hour and a half of boring, meaningless nonsense that thinks it has something profound to say about families or…honestly…who cares? This movie throws a dozen paranormal investigators into one sequence that ultimately couldn’t mean less than it does. It’s jarring and weird and not anyone’s idea of a what a horror movie is. If these movies haven’t been written by AI at this point…they are certainly being written by someone who has never seen a movie. Jessica Chastain and the little girl are pretty good in it. That’s all I got for you.
Scare Value
Blumhouse movies have become the Breaking Bad “He can’t keep getting away with this” meme. There is no substance to Other Mommy. There isn’t really any style either, but it thinks there is which is worse than just not having any. It sacrifices common sense, likable characters and a story you could possibly care about for…honestly…I don’t know for what. Whoever cut the original trailer for this movie deserves a raise. In fact, let them write and direct your productions from now on, Blumhouse. At least they have some concept of effective storytelling.
1.5/5
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