Jessica Chastain Plays Mom and Monster in 'Other Mommy' — SkimNews
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- Jessica Chastain plays dual roles — mother Ursula and the titular entity — in Universal Pictures' 'Other Mommy,' a domestic horror about a monster who wants 8-year-old Bela to invite her inside her heart and, more fundamentally, to be recognized as a person.
- Rob Savage directs the adaptation of Josh Malerman's 2024 novel 'Incidents Around the House,' with a screenplay by Nathan Elston that substantially departs from the source to let Ursula confront 'a more shameful truth' than parental love alone.
- Arabella Olivia Clark anchors the film as Bela, credited by the reviewer with keeping the escalating absurdities grounded even as her surroundings fill with 'deflated skin, confetti, broken glass, and blood.'
- Dichen Lachman plays paranormal investigator Lois Anthony in a scene the reviewer likens to 'Chris Hansen for ghosts,' solemnly declaring 'we wish to be heard by the entity known as Other Mommy.'
- The visual style evokes 'AI-slop, dreamcore' social media videos and draws comparisons to 'Skinamarink' and 'The Backrooms,' with the camera soaring through walls and ceilings — the opposite of Savage's pandemic-era found-footage hit 'Host.'
- The reviewer calls the film 'frequently ridiculous, rarely frightening, and strangely sad,' singling out Chastain's emotional range as her most impressive special effect rather than the creature's body-contorting tricks.
Why it matters: Savage's leap from the lo-fi, Zoom-call 'Host' to a studio-backed 'Boogeyman' and now this technically extravagant Universal release positions him as 'an artist already figuring out how to stretch the boundaries,' though the review warns his appetite for spectacle sometimes outpaces his storytelling patience — a tension that determines whether 'Other Mommy' lands as dream or noise.
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