Verdict: 3/5
There’s something inherently creepy as a parent about a malevolent entity living inside your home, let alone the bedroom of your seven-year-old daughter.
There’s something even more creepy about that entity looking and sounding like you, and hearing your daughter refer to it as ‘Other Mommy’.
Adapted from best selling book Incidents Around The House by Josh Malerman, ‘Other Mommy’ follows seven-year-old Bela living in a house with clear marital problems.
The disconnect between her family is exacerbated by, you guessed it, an entity living within her room that looks and sounds exactly like her mother. Fondly called ‘Other Mommy’, this entity befriends Bela, offering her comfort in a time of need, and always asking “Can I go into your heart?”.
As her parents (played by Jessica Chastain and Jay Duplass) fight to understand just what is so interested in their daughter, all hell breaks loose as ‘Other Mommy’ becomes more and more violent, desperate to go inside Bela’s heart and switch places with her.
As a lover of the book, I was very excited to see this film. The book is creepy, unsettling and downright eerie, making me fear for a time I might have a child with an active imagination.
The film however, didn’t quite live up to expectations.
Marketing boasted a jump scare roughly every 96 seconds, which sounds like a lot, but didn’t feel like it actually came to fruition. Even when they did, they were low level and expected.
The plot was fairly close to the book, but included significant changes to the story’s direction and characters.
For all its marketing and high scare count, this movie was just fine, and honestly a bit of a disappointment.
See this movie at Hoyts Penrith.
