Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | October 12, 2026
I’m impressed by one thing about Other Mommy: It’s an old-school marketing snow job. In the era of social media, we rarely see a movie this bad, with a CinemaScore this low (D+), defy toxic word of mouth and haul in $27.5 million in its opening weekend (on an $18 million budget). Credit the trailer, because even I walked in with a certain disbelief: How bad could a movie with that trailer actually be?
Very bad. Embarrassingly bad. Epochally bad. Just all kinds of awful.
That opening sequence in the trailer that hooked everyone? It’s also the opening sequence of the movie, and it’s all downhill from there. There’s no tension. There’s no build. We meet “The Other Mommy” immediately and spend the rest of the movie figuring out why she exists. And that’s the thing about good horror movies: They withhold the reveal as long as possible. They make things go bump in the night first. They gaslight their characters into believing the monster isn’t real.
In Other Mommy, eight-year-old Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) more or less conjures the evil entity/imaginary friend. Her dad (Jay Duplass) sees it and calls the cops (who do nothing). Then Bela’s mom (Jessica Chastain) sees it and panics because it looks just like her. They try to outrun it — crashing at a friend’s house, fleeing to grandma’s — but the entity stalks them, haunts them, and even kills a couple of people. Eventually, Bela, Mom, and Dad return home to confront The Other Mommy on her own turf, where Bela banishes her by shouting “Go away!” over and over. No magic spell, no incantation, no secret weapon. She basically yells: Get out of my house!
And it works. It works for reasons that defy all logic: Bela simply doesn’t need The Other Mommy anymore. Her parents are going through a rough patch, see. Her mom is having an affair and keeps Bela at arm’s length. Her dad mostly gets emotionally steamrolled by her mom. So I guess Bela summons The Other Mommy to supply the love and stability she’s missing … ? And to kill her mom’s lover, I guess.
Anyway … spoilers here … Bela finally musters the courage to banish The Other Mommy when her actual mommy comes clean, and the truth is that her dad isn’t her biological father, and that Mom never wanted a baby because she didn’t want to surrender her freedom, but Dad really loves Bela and raised her, biology be damned, and Mom is just really sorry she didn’t love her enough. Bela then rages at them for about three minutes because her whole life is a lie, before abruptly changing her mind and ordering The Other Mommy to leave. Which she does. Then her parents patch things up and everyone lives happily ever after (except the lover and the two other people The Other Mommy killed, whose deaths apparently go unexplained to the rest of the world).
Again, it’s absolute nonsense. The story is blather, the script — from Nathan Elston and Josh Malerman — is baffling, and even the performances (Jessica Chastain’s especially) make no sense. The supernatural entity makes no sense. She simply materializes and then vanishes, and the movie never bothers to explain why she exists in the first place, beyond Bela being upset by the strain in her parents’ marriage. Nor does it establish any rules for The Other Mommy: She can trail them anywhere, pop up at random, whisk them from place to place as if through a portal, and even teleport the balls from a ball pit 50 or 100 miles away into Bela’s bedroom. It’s as though director Rob Savage said, “This sequence would be cool,” and nobody told him, “But it doesn’t make a lick of sense for the movie.”
Also, none of the sequences are actually cool. They’re just dumb. It plays like brain-rot horror, a horror movie for the Roblox generation, which apparently doesn’t care about the basics of plot, structure, or character development. Savage just hurls cheap special effects at the screen and says, “Let them eat cake!” Bela banishes The Other Mommy by telling her to go away. I’d recommend the same approach to the movie.
