Other Mommy holds 23% Rotten Tomatoes rating as critics pan film

Jessica Chastain stars in Other Mommy, a horror film directed by Rob Savage and produced by James Wan that holds a 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie features the Oscar winner in dual roles as working mother Ursula and the supernatural entity haunting her young daughter, but critics have given the fright flick a severe panning for misfiring across its tone and execution.

Praised Performances Amid Narrative Flaws

Other perspectives found enough momentum in the chaos to keep the watch entertaining. The Daily Beast critic Nick Schager framed the project as a flawed but entertaining horror movie, highlighting the film’s unbridled rollercoaster momentum and hallucinatory haunted-house energy as key reasons it functions well. In Australia, The AU Review critic Peter Gray observed that despite a strong premise and talent, the feature delivers an increasingly silly exercise in supernatural excess that never comes close to realising its potential.

Clever Concept Falters Due to Lack of Tension

The Hollywood Reporter critic Richard Lawson credited Savage’s film as a clever concept that ultimately falters in its execution, writing that it is a clever conceit, to anthropomorphize a child’s sense that something is wrong in her family unit. Lawson praised Chastain for flashing lots of menacing smiles and scraping and jittering around, but found that the overarching narrative suffers from a lack of tension and coherence. He noted that the film fails to build suspense because the entity starts creepy and only gets more so, leaving the feature feeling like an attractive but mostly vacuous collection of jumpy bits and half-baked mythology.