The buzz was real. Universal attached Other Mommy to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, the trailer's limb-bending imagery racked up 30 million YouTube views, and BuzzFeed ran the definitive audience-reaction piece. None of that is a reliable indicator of a good film, but it was a reliable indicator that the imagery worked — that something in the setup cut through. The film that follows cuts through considerably less. Rob Savage's studio horror output has a consistent shape: technically clean, creatively cautious, built for the opening-weekend audience rather than the one that remembers films a year later. He earned goodwill with Host, the Zoom-call Covid horror that remains one of the only genuinely necessary pandemic films, but his subsequent studio work — The Boogeyman included — has trended toward craft-for-hire. Other Mommy continues the pattern. The film can count jump scares; it cannot sustain dread. Chastain is the film's actual argument for itself. Her ability to play cold competence is well-documented, and here she gets to weaponize it twice: the overworked mother struggling to warm up at home, and the demon who has studied warmth the way an actor studies a role and still can't quite nail the eyes. Both are desperate to win a child's love. Both are performing. The wrongness of the latter — the smile that runs a half-beat too long, the fingers that don't add up — is where the film briefly becomes what it promised. That Chastain's overpronounced smile echoes the Smile franchise is noted, fairly, by the review; it is the film's one clear image-language risk and it mostly lands. The source material is Josh Malerman's Incidents Around the House, and the title change tells you everything about the adaptation's agenda. Malerman's novel is slow-burn dread. Savage's film wants the instant blaze: 50 jump scares by his own count, roughly one every two minutes. The problem is arithmetical — a scare that arrives every two minutes is not a scare, it is a rhythm, and the body learns rhythms quickly. By the midpoint, the film's loudest moments are its least frightening, while its smallest ones — a wrong finger count, a face that almost holds — are doing the real work. Nathan Elston's screenplay (he comes from Succession, which raises expectations the film does not meet) struggles to keep the internal logic coherent once the monster's campaign escalates. The rules governing what Other Mommy can and cannot do bend under pressure from the set pieces rather than the set pieces bending to serve the rules. Why does she keep appearing in full-body-horror mode to a child she's trying to befriend? The film doesn't resolve this — it moves past it. The father's delayed horror, the absent police after a midpoint death, a finale that trades the novel's bleaker ending for Poltergeist-style house-rattling: each choice prioritizes the funhouse over the psychological trap the premise set. The psychological trap, had Savage stayed in it, was genuinely creepy: a child forced to choose between the love she needs and the love she wants, manipulated by a demon who has correctly identified the emotional gap in her home. That's not a standard haunted-house movie. That's closer to something Patricia Highsmith might have written if she'd decided to write horror. The film glimpses it, mostly in Chastain's performance, then sprints away toward more VFX. Savage is not a bad filmmaker. He is a filmmaker who has not yet found the studio project that requires him to be a distinctive one. Other Mommy's failure is not incompetence — the film is technically accomplished — but priority. A chillier, quieter version of this film, one that trusted Chastain's register and Malerman's pacing, would have been worth the 30 million YouTube views. The one Universal released is worth two stars and a Saturday afternoon if you're already a fan of the genre and have appropriately low expectations.
