‘Other Mommy’ is reportedly the worst horror movie of the year, but is that really the case? Chad Collins argues otherwise.
Welcome to Devil’s Advocate, a space where we go against the grain. Each piece here spotlights a horror movie, good or bad, that we felt differently about than most people. See why, and please – don’t condemn us.
I’m grateful Dread Central has stopped doing a Worst Of list every year. It’s been close to a decade since we last published one, and despite my personal grievances with such lists, I think they serve no objective, illustrative purpose. Largely because horror is so incredibly subjective, whatever the worst movie of the year is to me is almost guaranteed to be different from yours. Today’s media ecosystem especially compounds the problem. Festival hype, influencer-only screenings, last-minute edits, trailers for trailers, and sundry other variables result in all of us going into the same movie with wildly different expectations. Case in point? Rob Savage’sOther Mommy, a box office triumph and also (according to reviews), the worst horror movie of the year.
I’m a huge fan of Josh Malerman’s source material, Incidents Around the House, so I was locked into my screening even after the embargo lifted and reviews trickled in, spotlighting how Other Mommy wasn’t just bad, but bad bad – borderline incomprehensible, sloppy, and never scary. A 17% on Rotten Tomatoes and a D+ on CinemaScore are big oooph moments, even for horror, a genre that historically scores lower among the popular press. Consider Scream 7’s B- Cinemascore and 30% Rotten Tomatoes score (not to mention an Audience Score that sits at 70% compared to Other Mommy’s 48%). Siddhant Adlakha, writing for Variety, said, “That’s about all that Other Mommy is to its audience too: an annoyance to be handwaved, rather than tension or meaning to be confronted at any stage. Feel free to keep your arms and legs outside the ride; it’s not going anywhere.”
So, I went in expecting something awful. Sure enough, at least going off the perspective of those around me, Other Mommy was a cinematic fart – a gaseous horror movie that built and built without any release. My friends hated it, my packed auditorium groaned and rolled their eyes, and several audience members even booed when the credits rolled (dramatic, but that’s the movie theater for you). I stood alone. I… didn’t hate it? In fact, all things considered, I kind of vibed with Savage’s take on Malerman’s novel (a novel that, admittedly, was always going to be challenging to adapt).
I can certainly concede Other Mommy was never scary. Not once. I winced at a gnarly death, sure, but otherwise, I never felt even a prickle of fear rising up within me. Annoyance, sure, but I blame that more on Andy Muschietti and It: Chapter One than anything (my theory is the design of today’s CG horror monsters can be traced back to Muschietti’s smash hit). Other Mommy, then, failed its one key requirement as a horror movie, but when adjusting the framework and critically assessing the film not as a horror movie, it lands a lot better, and otherwise emerges not as the year’s failure, but as its most ambitious, unclassifiable genre hybrid.
Jessica Chastain as Other Mommy in Other Mommy, directed by Rob Savage.
In my immediate, Letterboxd-ready reaction, I noted a striking similarity to Troy Nixey’s feature debut, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (a remake of the made-for-television movie of the same name). Like Other Mommy, Nixey’s 2010 Gothic reimagining was lambasted for slight characterizations, insufficient tension, and otherwise being entirely devoid of a single good scare. Fifteen years ago, however, I fell in love with Nixey’s take on the material, and revisiting it for Terror on Tubi back in August, my perspective hadn’t shifted at all. It’s a weak horror movie but an exceptional fable.
Other Mommy, with its fairy-tale trappings and fable-esque visual sensibilities, works far better as a dark coming-of-age tale than as a conventional horror movie. And while I certainly can’t speak for Savage (and his jump-scare declaration to the press didn’t help matters), I think that’s maybe what was intended. Structurally, Other Mommy’s cadence is the strongest evidence.
Unconventional for not just a horror movie, but movies in general, Other Mommy starts in medias res, only the film never rewinds back to what happened before. Within the first fifteen minutes, the titular Other Mommy has been seen and is a known entity to Jessica Chastain’s Ursula Martin (in dual roles as the monster itself) and Jay Duplass’ Russ “Daddo” Martin. Isabella “Bela” Martin (newcomer Arabella Olivia Clark) has been aware of Other Mommy’s presence for an indeterminate, though believed to be considerable, amount of time.
Writer Nathan Elston eschews exposition, a common point of contention in critical reviews of the film, and simply allows Other Mommy and her supernatural influence to be. There’s no protracted “this isn’t real” debate, no push-pull between the Martin family’s sanity and the broader public witnessing their ordeal. Hell, within moments of meeting anyone, it’s swiftly confirmed that Other Mommy is not only real, but incredibly, monumentally dangerous.
For some, that accelerated clip is a cardinal sin, one from which Other Mommy never recovers (some reviews, for instance, mention that the opening scare would reasonably be another film’s climax). For me, it’s simply a testament to the chaos of adolescence, the speed with which the world around you seems to change. It’s scary. It’s unpredictable. And, well, it’s temporally disorienting. The pain of growing up is never linear, and it’s certainly not aligned with moviemaking’s three-act structure.
Jessica Chastain as Other Mommy in Other Mommy, directed by Rob Savage.
Clark is revelatory as Bela (that, at least, critics can agree on). Her emotional whiplash is what grounds Other Mommy for me, squaring its more fantastical elements (warping, giant oceanic hands, balls…) with an earnest, and frankly, touching exploration of life’s rougher edges and the age at which you simply need to accept people as more fallible—often crueler—than you first thought. At its core, after all, Other Mommy is really just a scary movie about a young girl realizing her parents aren’t the canonized saints she once thought they were (if they’re even biologically her parents at all…).
Like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, it’s a Gothic Horror Show that, while contextually scary, is really just about a young girl growing up in a world that’s increasingly hostile to her and her sensitive, adolescent heart. In both films, the world tries to break it, offering either protagonist an easy (though myopic and sinister) way out. Much has been said about Other Mommy’s divergence from the novel’s much more explicit bummer of an ending, though I’m inclined to find more resonance—and pain—in the film’s credo.
The monster might be gone, but all the messy truths it stirred up along the way will endure. Bela, by the film’s end, must choose to either leave her heart open for the unknowable hope of something better, or close it off to the world entirely. A familiar sentiment, but one augmented by Savage’s kitchen-sink approach to fantastical horror filmmaking. In the most complimentary terms, if the late, great Frances Hodgson Burnett made a horror movie, I think it’d look a lot like Other Mommy.
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