Other Mommy (2026)

The closet door is the cheapest set in horror. Every filmmaker knows it. Other Mommy rests its whole premise on that door, and I spent much of the film wondering what its makers had planned for after the first shock wore off.

Bela is eight, played by Arabella Olivia Clark, and she lives in a house where her parents’ marriage is fraying. Jessica Chastain and Jay Duplass play the adults in her house; Dichen Lachman, Karen Allen, and Arian Moayed round out the cast. At night a presence begins to emerge from Bela’s closet, and she calls it Other Mommy. It wants to be let in. Rob Savage, who made Host and The Boogeyman, directs from a screenplay by Nathan Elston (a writer on Succession), adapting Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House; Malerman also wrote Bird Box.

Chastain plays Bela’s mother and the entity, and the double role is the best idea on offer. The thing that comes for a child wears the face of the woman she already has. It returns Chastain to ground she covered in Mama and It Chapter Two, both directed by Andy Muschietti, and she commits to it. I never saw her coast along. A double role can easily turn into a stunt, but here it works as an argument about what a child wants from a mother, and what she will let in when she doesn’t get it.

That argument is the film’s real subject. A girl in a household where the adults have stopped paying attention makes room for a second mother who pays attention too well. Savage told Entertainment Weekly the film holds about fifty jump scares, and a count that high forces a choice about whether the scares serve the marriage story or interrupt it. For me they did both, in roughly equal measure. When the film trusts a still frame and a child’s face, the idea lands. When it reaches for the next shock, it loses what it had built.

Comparisons to Mama are unavoidable, and the film invites them: another Chastain horror about a child and a maternal presence that won’t stay in the dark. Mama gave its ghost a history and a grief. Here the entity arrives with a hunger and a smile, which unsettles for a time and thins out once the story needs it to carry the weight of a family’s troubles. I wanted the parents’ strained marriage to hurt as much as the creature did, and too often it sat there as set dressing.

Savage knows how to make a bedroom feel like a trap, and that skill is on show here: one small room, one child, one door that won’t stay shut. The staging gives the scares somewhere to live.

Skill alone can’t fix a structural problem. Once the closet door has swung open a few times, a haunting needs to escalate, and Bela’s parents need a marriage story with momentum of its own; the film asks each to wait on the other, and neither gets a clear run. I came away admiring the setup and wishing the middle would commit to one of its two stories.

I’d call the result mixed in the plainest sense. Anyone who goes for domestic hauntings and a committed lead performance will find enough to hold their attention, provided the MA15+ (US:R) rating (for bloody violence and language) suits them. Anyone who needs the scares to add up to something more than a tally should adjust their hopes.