Director: Rob Savage
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Arabella Olivia Clark, Jay Duplass
Dashing through cinemas like a child breathlessly trying to tell you every element of a story all at once, Rob Savage’s Other Mommy features one of the very best performances of the year. And no, it’s not Jessica Chastain for her one-note rictus-grin demon doppelganger. The real star here is young Arabella Olivia Clark who plays Bela, the generally sweet young child targeted by a monstrous all-powerful entity that desires only to be human by inhabiting her heart. All Bela has to say is “yes”. It’s not unfair to say that Clark – a mildly experienced child actor but still shockingly young – carries the whole of Other Mommy, evidencing both range and screen nous. The film that perpetually crashes around her, however, is a dizzying tonal gambit that doesn’t quite pay off.
This thing operates like someone in the projector booth leaned on a button setting it to 1.5 speed. By the time we reach the appropriately hyperactive title card we’ve already established the core family – Bela, her mother Ursula (Chastain) and father Russ/Daddo (Jay Duplass) – the supernatural threat targeting them, how it is called into being by Bela, its powerful reality-bending superiority to them, and that all three have bought into its existence. No time-wasting first act scepticism here. One might say that Other Mommy dispenses with cliché as it charges forward. One might also say that it’s nothing but cliché, as it replaces these things with over-familiar and horribly wrought CG bedlam.
Bela’s ‘Other Mommy’, portrayed by Chastain (but not only Chastain), isn’t really a performance as such, rather a base onto which the film’s VFX houses can apply their goo like so much uncanny-valley make-up. An eyeball drooping here, the neck elongating there. Because there’s no chill to the movie, there’s no attempt to make us believe or even understand this menace as anything other than an undulating mass of computer data. So much so that when Bela calls ‘her’ out for having six fingers at one point, the inclination is to think of it as a clumsy AI imitation. We’ve all seen that technology fumble a human form. Through this lens Other Mommy could be seen as a reflection of our apprehension with this new technology, which seems hellbent on infecting all aspects of our lives, including parenting. The insinuation works against the picture too, however. I was moved to sit through all of the credits to see if it was buttoned with a disclaimer that it couldn’t be used to train AI. It does have that credit. But huge swathes of it looks like AI slop. If this is an aesthetic choice, it’s a godawful one.
Ursula and Russ aren’t good parents. Russ spends half his time stoned and, when the pair throw themselves an anniversary party, Bela is paraded around like an object used to sell the idea of their family unit. Much like Savage’s previous film – the underloved PG horror The Boogeyman – Other Mommy inspects a breakdown of communication in a household, and how that rips the dynamics apart. There are obvious and not-so-obvious secrets that need to be spilled. But first, a whole lot of breathless running around and a free-fall into incoherent hysteria. A brief spell at soft play underscores how that’s one of developed society’s true living hells, but it blunders the liminal potential of the maze-like space. Similarly, a guest spot for Dichen Lachman and a crew of paranormal investigators is over before it begins. The gusto is appreciated. It’s different. But it mainly underscores why a majority of filmmakers take time with their stories. Other Mommy feels like someone using an Insidious script as a flick-book, and that someone feels like Jeff Wadlow (jump scare).
There’s no rest point here, which makes this 90 minute movie thoroughly exhausting and, after a while, just a wall of noise. Savage spends more time on a succession of intricate (and admittedly nifty) scene transitions than notions of character, nuance or scene setting. Dispensing with the latter could’ve played as a canny trick. Frequently dumping us into the middle of scenes, we can’t help but wonder if any given character is ‘Other Mommy’ in disguise. But the relentless charge of the movie doesn’t allow time for such suspicions to acquire power. Savage will have blown the mystery within 20 seconds anyway. Like Smile on speed, the methodology is attack, attack, attack, and the movie descends into collaged nonsense. By the time the central tri0 are having a crazed party with a table of household weapons, there’s little point asking questions about the sense behind it.
Which is a shame, because there are good ideas in here, and Clark’s performance is genuinely worth celebrating. Unfortunately the effects-heavy barrage leaves me with the same advice given to Bela. Just say no.
