Written by Nathan Elston
Based on the novel “Incidents Around the House” by Josh Malerman
Directed by Rob Savage
Starring Jessica Chastain, Jay Duplass, Arabella Olivia Clark and Karen Allen
USA, 2026
Jessica Chastain is terrifying, so it stands to reason that someone would eventually make a horror movie about her. I guess this isn’t even the first one, since she was also in MAMA, another movie about a creepy supernatural mother figure. In that one she was trying to protect a couple of little girls from a ghostly mommy. This time she's playing the mommy. Two of ’em.
Arabella Olivia Clark plays an eight-year-old girl who starts encountering a strange entity in her house that looks and sounds like her mother (Chastain). Except this version of Mommy has sinister intentions. Meanwhile, the girl’s actual parents are dealing with their own problems, making it difficult for the girl to imagine they’d actually care if they ever noticed anything happening.
OTHER MOMMY doesn't waste time getting to the good stuff. We don't have to sit through an hour of strange noises and things moving around in the background before somebody finally acknowledges that there's a monster in the house. This movie’s all business.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the story is told from the little girl’s perspective. Horror movies about children being terrorized have a tendency to shift the focus to the adults, but this one really commits to seeing things through the eyes of a little girl who doesn't entirely understand what's happening around her. The young actress is up to the challenge.
Chastain, meanwhile, gets to be both a concerned (if aloof) mother and something considerably less pleasant. There's also a welcome appearance by Karen Allen, who I wasn't expecting to see here, or anywhere, sadly.
My favorite sequence involved a bunch of ghost hunters showing up with all their technical gadgets to hold a séance. I hate to give away the payoff of this sequence, but it was unexpected and fun. Still, the movie as a whole doesn’t quite hold together. I don’t know exactly what it is. There’s lots to like about it but in the end I was left feeling unsatisfied. Though from the look on Chastain’s face in the last scene, it seems like she is, too, so maybe that’s the point?
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