Other Mommy
Rating: 1/5
By: Nathaniel Simpson
Blumhouse's Other Mommy is one of those movies that when walking out of the theater, I simply wondered, "what the hell happened?" I went in after reading Josh Malerman's Incidents Around the House, and I thought for sure they would be able to craft this terrifying horror film that could possibly change the game for Blumhouse. However, what they released was a horrendous, uninspired film that was simply not scary nor entertaining; the most entertaining thing about this entire film was my buddies and I cracking jokes at the film's expense for the last half of this picture.
The film is centered around young Bela (Arabella Olivia Clarke), who lives with her mother (Jessica Chastain) and father (Jay Duplass) in a nice house that harbors a lot of secrets. While people who look into this family from the outside, you think they are living the dream. However, with marital problems and trying to balance family life with their jobs, it may be harder than expected. What you don't except in this situation, though, is that there is a secret entity living in Bela's closet, named Other Mommy. At night, this other form of Bela's mom comes out and asks if she can enter Bela's heart, with the little girl always telling her no. When Other Mommy starts to grow restless and demands Bela say yes, she starts to wreak havoc for the family, making them take drastic measures to destroy Other Mommy for good.
This movie has such a promising premise that could genuinely be one of the scariest movies of the year, and the filmmakers simply craft this boring, horribly-crafted film that doesn't work on almost every level. I'm not sure what went wrong here, especially since they have great source material in the form of Malerman's book, but they throw it out the window and wanted to try something that only feels a tiny bit connected to the book. The more important moments of the story feel incredibly rushed and pushed to the side which makes the story feel very jumbled and disconnected. There is an important monologue in the climax of this film that makes perfect sense in the book, and felt like something they had to put in randomly in the movie. It's really unfortunate and frustrating to watch because I feel like you if read the book, you were able to craft the story for it on the screen in your head, and I wonder why the filmmakers here weren't able to do that.
Jessica Chastain and the other actors here truly try their best to make something of this movie, but they simply can't save this huge dumpster fire. There is so much going on that's wrong in this film that the actors unfortunately suffer the same fate. I hate to say it, but the horrible writing hinders the performances and makes them feel cheesy and insufferable at times. We can't blame the actors for this as they are simply reciting the lines given to them, but I hate how it makes them seem like lesser-than actors than they actually are. However, with that being said, it's a surprise that any of these talented actors signed on with seeing how the script was.
The CGI here is horrendous, the scares are basically nonexistent, and there is truly nothing here to keep the audience engaged and entertained with. The one and only thing I would say I liked about this movie was the cinematography from Lowell A. Meyer, who I think did some really interesting camera work with some of the shots here. I think he captured the movie in a really unique way, one that feels slightly different than what you would see from a run-of-the-mill horror flick. It definitely isn't good enough to save the movie, but at least it made it a little bit more bearable.
I should've known better than to get my hopes up for this movie, but I genuinely felt so let-down and disappointed by everything here. It's frustrating that Blumhouse had the chance to make something really special, and they decided to go with such a generic and easily-accessible movie that simply isn't good. Blumhouse, in my opinion, really needs to start working hard and releasing better horror films if they want to get back in the good graces of the audience because this is genuinely unacceptable.
Comments
Post a Comment