Other Mommy Review: Jessica Chastain Carries a Horror Film That Falters

Other Mommy is not worth watching as horror. It is worth watching for two performances, and the rest of Rob Savage's film, which opened in US theaters through Universal on October 9, 2026, is a stack of loud noises around a story with too much in it and too little underneath. The premise is strong. A demon that has copied a mother comes to take a child's heart. The execution is fifty jump scares that all arrive the same way, and a tone that keeps turning while the thing on screen is doing something else entirely. Critics noticed. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 18 percent from 89 reviews and Metacritic sits at 38 from 14 critic reviews, both checked on October 21, 2026.

The money tells a different story. The Numbers, checked on October 21, 2026, has Other Mommy at $45,415,130 domestic and $79,625,130 worldwide against a $19 million production budget, which is four times what it cost, with $27,805,825 of the domestic total arriving in the opening weekend from 3,365 theatres. People bought tickets. They did not all love what they bought. The certificate in the US is R and the runtime is 93 minutes.

Spoiler-free verdict: Skip it unless you are here for the two leads. A 93-minute, R-rated horror movie from Rob Savage with Jessica Chastain playing both a mother and the thing pretending to be her, adapted from Josh Malerman's novel. Rotten Tomatoes says 18 percent from 89 critic reviews as of October 21, 2026. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Other Mommy is about

Bela is a girl at the age when a child can tell that her parents have stopped talking to each other. Her mother Ursula works. Her father is at home with her and takes her to the park. Then a second mother turns up. It looks like Ursula, it sounds like Ursula, it knows things only Ursula would know, and it calls itself Other Mommy. What it wants is entry. It asks Bela to let it into her heart, over and over, in the voice of a new friend who has all the time in the world.

The rule the film sets for itself is that Other Mommy cannot take a body without permission. That makes the family the last line of defence and Bela the only person who can settle it. The entity follows them from the house to the grandmother's, from a fast food restaurant to the edge of a lake under a hilltop mansion, and it keeps changing shape on the way. Savage adapted the book from Josh Malerman, the Bird Box novelist, who wrote the source novel as Incidents Around the House. The screenplay is by Nathan Elston.

Cast and performances

Chastain plays both halves of the title, Ursula and the thing wearing Ursula, and the two are played at different temperatures. Benjamin Lee in The Guardian noticed the split: her "elegant iciness" sells a hard-working parent who cannot soften at home and an untrustworthy monster hunting for the right expression to fool a child. Every time the film cuts between the two, the hair stands up a little.

Arabella Olivia Clark plays Bela, and she is the discovery of the film. Variety's Siddhant Adlakha called her "a captivating, naturalistic presence" and then admitted the script wears her down. Jay Duplass plays the father, who Adlakha read as "a broad caricature out of a comedy sketch," which is closer to the truth than the film intends. Karen Allen plays the grandmother, who runs a house full of spiritualist trappings and hires a team of paranormal investigators, and Arian Moayed plays the uncle whose presence in the family turns out to matter more than his handful of scenes. Dichen Lachman is the exorcist who comes with that team.

What works

The performance work. Chastain makes a monster out of attentive parenting, and the moments when the copy sits a beat too long in a doorway or smiles one fraction too wide are the scenes that actually land. Clark's face carries a question the script never answers out loud, and when the film finally answers it, she is the one who has to act on it.

The production. The house has weight and the entity has a design, and the middle of the film has a physicality the script does not always deserve. The Guardian's Lee caught the best of it, the small blips where Other Mommy's body gives itself away, "the wrong amount of fingers, an accidental skin slip on her face," before the picture tips into full body horror.

The marketing also deserves a mention because it changed the film's fortunes. The Guardian reported that the trailer ran past 30 million views on YouTube, that screen grabs became memes, and that Universal booked the trailer to play before The Odyssey, the second biggest film of the year. That is a marketing victory and it explains the box office.

What doesn't

Fifty jump scares. Savage has bragged about the count, and Benjamin Lee's Guardian review put it at roughly one every two minutes. The number is the problem as much as the tactic. Adlakha's Variety review noticed that they "grow quickly stale, since they all unfold pretty much the same way," with the camera circling an unsuspecting character and revealing the monster from behind. Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter was blunter: "an attractive but mostly vacuous collection of jumpy bits and half-baked mythology."

The tone. The film plays like a horror comedy that was recut as a straight scarefest, with missing chunks, and it cannot decide whether it is being funny or being sincere. Adlakha called the result "among the most limp and ineffectual works to grace the screen this year, misfiring in every direction, including and especially its tone." The Guardian's Lee would rather have had the quiet version: "There's a chillier, quieter version of Other Mommy that could have really crept under our skin, but Savage is too busy trying to give us a heart attack to care if he gives us nightmares."

The people in the house. Nobody behaves like a person. Bela's parents accept a monster in the kitchen because the plot needs them to, and the grandmother's team of investigators gets out of the way so the family can be frightened somewhere else.

What audiences say

Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 18 percent from 89 reviews and the Popcornmeter at 48 percent from more than 1,000 verified ratings, and its audience panel summary says the film "is only a semi-scary experience that leaves much to be desired." Metacritic's user score is 4.7 from 66 ratings. Letterboxd is the harshest number in the film, with a member average of 2.19 from 226,535 ratings and 116,715 written reviews. TMDB has it at 6.0 from 136 votes. JustWatch's own score is 53 percent from 179 ratings. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026.

Where to watch Other Mommy

Other Mommy is still playing in US cinemas, and it is not on a streaming service yet. JustWatch checked 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and could not find an offer for the film in the United States, and TMDB's own US provider list is empty as well. In Canada, TMDB lists a digital purchase through CosmoGo. Tickets are on sale through Atom Tickets, Cinemark, Cinepolis Cinemas, Harkins Theatres, B&B Theatres and Marcus Theatres.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Other Mommy streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Other Mommy worth watching? Not as horror. If you are a Chastain completist, or you want to see Clark's performance before anyone else casts her, it earns your time, and you should go on a big screen with the sound up. If you are hoping for a film with a build, you will be checking the time. Rotten Tomatoes' consensus says that despite a valiant turn from Jessica Chastain as the spectral embodiment of a smothering parent, the film "proves too silly for its intermittently effective jump scares to add up to a spooky whole." The 2.19 on Letterboxd says the people who paid to see it mostly agreed. Savage made a trailer people screamed at and a film that does not earn that scream.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Other Mommy

The family barricades itself in the basement with weapons that do nothing, and Ursula decides that the only way to weaken the thing is to take away the thing it feeds on. She tells Bela the truth about her own life: that Bela's real father is not the man raising her but Ursula's first husband, whom she left, and that she never wanted to be a mother at all. The confession does weaken Other Mommy. It also devastates Bela, who runs upstairs to her bedroom and begs the entity to come in and take her heart, and the entity promises that she will never feel pain again.

Bela remembers what her grandmother told her, that pain is part of living, and she says no. She keeps saying no, to a monster that has been asking since the first scene, until the thing finally stops. There is no possession and no body swap. Other Mommy is gone by the end of it, and the house is still standing.

Months later, Bela and her parents hang Christmas lights together. Bela watches her mother from across the room and sees how tired she looks.