Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Other Mommy Is Chastain at Her Most Mesmerizing

Some performances you admire. A rarer kind makes you lean forward in your seat. Jessica Chastain does the rarer kind in Other Mommy, the supernatural family thriller from Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Atomic Monster that opened in theaters on October 9, 2026 – playing, in a dual role, both a devoted mother and the entity that has learned to wear her face. It is a beautiful, unnerving piece of acting, and it lifts an already handsomely made film into something that lingers on the drive home.

A Face a Child Trusts, Twice Over

The premise, adapted from Josh Malerman’s bestselling novel Incidents Around the House, is the sort of idea that sounds simple until you sit with it. Young Bela, played by Arabella Olivia Clark, has formed a bond with a presence in the family home – a figure who looks uncannily like her mother and whom Bela calls Other Mommy. The entity wants one thing, asked in the gentle language a small child would understand: to be let into her heart.

Chastain plays Bela’s real mother, Ursula, and the Other Mommy herself. The craft trick is that she cannot play them as hero and cartoon villain. The entity works precisely because it borrows a mother’s warmth, so Chastain shades the two performances close together – the same voice, the same tenderness, with something fractionally off in the copy, a pause held a breath too long, a smile that arrives at the wrong moment. Watching her move between the two registers is the film’s central pleasure, and it is considerable.

Savage Knows Where to Put the Camera

Director Rob Savage, who made Host and The Boogeyman, has always understood that the scariest room in any house is the one you know best. He shoots the family home with patience – hallways held a beat longer than comfort allows, doorways framed so your eyes keep checking the edges. The scares, when they come, are staged with old-fashioned discipline: sound design doing quiet work, light doing quieter work, and a director confident enough to let a scene build instead of lunging at the audience every ninety seconds.

The screenplay, by Nathan Elston, keeps the focus where it belongs – on the family. Jay Duplass brings his rumpled, decent warmth to Daddo, Bela’s father, a man trying to hold a household together while doubting his own eyes. And Clark, carrying long stretches of the film at the center of the frame, is a genuine find: watchful, natural, never pushed into the over-precise acting that can sink a child performance. The supporting cast adds real class – Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen, whose presence alone gives the film a thread back to classic Hollywood.

Producer James Wan, one of the architects of the Saw, Insidious and Conjuring films, knows this territory better than anyone working today, and the production carries that polish throughout – a modestly scaled picture, running a tight 93 minutes, that looks and sounds far more expensive than it needed to.

A Thriller With Its Heart in the Right Place

What lifts Other Mommy above the seasonal pack is that its emotional math actually works. Underneath the supernatural machinery sits a recognisable story about a family under strain and a child deciding whom to trust – which means the climactic stretch lands as drama first and spectacle second. The film earns its ending the honest way, through the relationships it spent its first hour building. Genre fans comparing the autumn slate will find a very different flavour of big-screen thrill alongside titles like Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, and even audiences already looking ahead to Avengers: Secret Wars should make room for this smaller, stranger night at the movies.

A note for the faint-hearted: this is a frightening film in places, deliberately so, and younger viewers should sit it out. But the fear is crafted, not crude – atmosphere over shock, suggestion over excess – and adult audiences who appreciate the genre done properly will feel in safe, expert hands.

The Verdict

Other Mommy is a class act: a gifted director working his home turf, a literary source adapted with respect, and above all a star performance – two star performances, really – from Jessica Chastain that ranks with her finest genre work. See it in a theater, where its silences can do their work. Four stars, warmly given.

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