Universal Pictures It’s really no mystery why there are so many horror movies about mothers. It’s the first and most fundamental bond that most human beings have, making violations of the trust between mother and child deeply disturbing as well. What’s less understandable is why the titles of these films have to be so silly. Goodnight Mommy was bad enough, but at least that one (or the Austrian original, at least) was transgressive enough to give the name an edge. Other Mommy, meanwhile, has a scene where a psychic addresses “the entity known as Other Mommy” out loud multiple times during a séance. These evocations produced giggles from the audience at Inverse’s press screening, unintentional jokes that landed better than any of the film’s intentional attempts at humor. (Why director Rob Savage and screenwriter Nathan Elston chose to kneecap themselves in this way is unclear: The book this film is based on is called Incidents Around the House, which isn’t as catchy as Other Mommy but isn’t as risible, either.) Not that there are a lot of jokes to go around, as Savage’s films — which include the pandemic-era Zoom horror movie Host, as well as 2023’s The Boogeyman — are self-consciously nasty affairs. The helmets are because Other Mommy can throw stuff. | Universal Pictures Here, that manifests as a series of vicious horror set pieces, as when the man with whom regular mommy Ursula (Jessica Chastain) is obviously having an affair explodes into a puff of glitter after being turned inside out by the demonic Other Mommy (also Chastain) in the hallway of his ultra-modern glass-and-steel house. This is followed by a sequence where Ursula, her husband Russell (Jay Duplass), and their seven-year-old daughter Bella (Arabella Olivia Clark) flee from the house while being pursued by the shapeshifting entity with the ridiculous name. Lightbulbs explode and twisted shapes jump out from the shadows, and for a few moments Other Mommy is unadulterated haunted-house fun. The shapes that Other Mommy takes as she’s trying to convince Bella to “let [her] into your heart” are also commendably creepy, many of them drawing from Japanese horror influences both traditional (at one point, Other Mommy stretches her neck like a yokai) and modern (think long, tangled hair a lá The Grudge or The Ring). These are enhanced by Chastain’s committed physical performance, tensing her neck muscles as hard as she can and forcing one, presumably hot tear down her trembling cheek. Other Mommy melts, stretches — one of her forms is like a skinny white-lady version of Captain Clark from Backrooms — and twists herself into freaky, mandala-type shapes. Careful, kid! Other Mommy’s down there! | Universal Pictures But while her physical form is consistently striking — just waiting for her to come back onto the screen carries Other Mommy for most of its 85-minute run time — the deeper mechanics of how Other Mommy works are inconsistently applied. Sometimes she’s visible to adults, and sometimes she’s only visible to Bella. Sometimes she’s solid enough to throw heavy objects across the room, and sometimes a human’s fingers pass right through her. That’s all hand-waived away by the fact that she’s a demon, but other aspects of the film — like the psychic and her crew of technicians, who appear and then disappear again after another of those big, chaotic set pieces — are underdeveloped as well. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for a movie to leave you wanting more. Here, however, it seems to be a matter of misplaced priorities, as storytelling takes a backseat to cool imagery and wildly (one might even say nauseously) mobile camerawork from Savage and DP Lowell A. Meyer. The latter is only an issue when what’s going on in front of the camera gets chaotic enough that we can no longer follow the action. Which Mommy are you? | Universal PicturesWhere the shallowness becomes a real problem is in the film’s regressive social messaging, which can be boiled down to “maybe if you were a better mother, your kid wouldn’t have a demon attached to her,” but more insulting somehow. Here, Savage and Elston seem to be reaching for a theme of ambivalent motherhood along the lines of The Babadook, but this film simply does not have the emotional range to pull off something so prickly and complex. So there she lurks, in the shadow of what could have been a slick, if shallow, thrill ride. Forget about Other Mommy — the real threat here is Other Movie. From Universal Pictures, Other Mommy is now playing in theaters everywhere.