There are few things more disappointing than reading a book that scares the absolute bejesus out of you, finding out it’s being adapted into a movie, and then walking out of the theater thinking, “Well, that was okay.”

Not terrible. Not great. Just okay.

That’s where I landed with OTHER MOMMY, the big-screen adaptation of Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House, one of the scariest books I’ve read in a very long time.

I loved that book.

And I mean loved it. The opening is one of the most terrifying introductions to a horror story I’ve ever experienced. Malerman takes the familiar haunted-house, demon, possession formula and gives it a wonderfully nasty twist. Different rules. Different territory. A different kind of monster.

The result is a story that makes you question every dark corner of your house, especially if there’s a kid involved.

Naturally, my expectations for the movie were pretty high.

Maybe too high.

Meet Other Mommy

OTHER MOMMY follows Bela, a young girl played by Arabella Olivia Clark, who lives with her mother Ursula (Jessica Chastain) and father, affectionately called Daddo (Jay Duplass). Their house is already filled with the messy complications of a family trying to keep itself together when something decidedly unwelcome shows up.

Bela begins encountering a strange, sinister entity she calls Other Mommy. It resembles her mother, but it’s definitely not her mother. And it has a deeply unsettling interest in getting closer to Bela.

As the encounters grow increasingly threatening, the family’s already complicated relationships become another source of vulnerability. The creature isn’t simply haunting a house. It’s worming its way into the emotional cracks of the people living there.

Directed by Rob Savage, with a screenplay by Nathan Elston, the movie also features Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed, and Karen Allen.

That’s the spoiler-free setup, and it’s a good one.

Actually, it’s a fantastic one.

This Ain’t the POLTERGEIST Family

One of the things I absolutely loved about Malerman’s book, and something the movie gets right, is the family.

We’ve seen a hundred horror movies about families living in picturesque suburban homes withperfect kitchens, perfect lawns, and parents who look like they were cast from an advertisement for mortgage refinancing.

Think POLTERGEIST.

Now, I love POLTERGEIST. Always will. But the Freeling family feels like a family from a movie.

The family in OTHER MOMMY feels like people you might actually know.

They’re dysfunctional. They’re oddballs. They make questionable decisions. They’re not always particularly likable. And they’re carrying around the sort of emotional baggage that doesn’t disappear just because something terrifying has moved into the house.

In other words, welcome to family life in 2026.

That’s part of what makes the underlying story so effective. These people have enough problems without an evil entity trying to join the household.

And unlike so many other supernatural horror movies, OTHER MOMMY doesn’t spend an eternity playing the “I can see something scary, but nobody believes me” game.

Thank heavens.

We’re not subjected to an hour of a child desperately trying to convince her parents that something is wrong while the adults schedule therapy appointments and explain away the supernatural activity as an overactive imagination.

Nope.

Everybody gets Other Mommy.

And I love that.

I also love that the movie doesn’t save its monster for a third-act reveal. Other Mommy is front and center early, and the filmmakers understand that seeing something terrifying doesn’t automatically make it less terrifying.

Sometimes knowing exactly what’s lurking in your house is much worse than wondering.

Jessica Chastain, Everybody

Let’s talk about Jessica Chastain.

She’s the shining star of this movie.

No surprise there.

Chastain plays both Bela’s mother and the monstrous presence threatening to take her place, and she brings a tremendous amount of commitment to the material.

There is something particularly unsettling about seeing a familiar face transformed into something that is just slightly, horribly wrong. Chastain understands that the scariest monsters aren’t always the ones with fangs, claws, or a face that looks like it lost an argument with a lawn mower.

Sometimes they’re the ones that look almost human.

Almost.

Clark also has a lot riding on her shoulders as Bela. This story depends on a child’s fear feeling real, and she gives the movie an emotional center amid all the supernatural unpleasantness.

Jay Duplass helps sell the family’s dysfunction as Daddo, and the supporting cast contributes to a world where the supernatural threat isn’t the only thing making life difficult.

The performances aren’t the problem.

For me, the problem is what happens to the movie after an excellent first half.

A First Half That Promises More Than the Second Delivers

The first half of OTHER MOMMY is really good.

The atmosphere works. The creature works. The family dynamic works. The scares work.

I was settling in for what I thought might become another entry on my all-time scariest movies list.

And then the movie starts running out of gas.

The second half simply doesn’t sustain the momentum, dread, or inventiveness established early on. Instead of getting progressively more frightening, the story starts feeling more conventional.

Which is unfortunate because there’s nothing conventional about Malerman’s premise.

This is where I started wishing another filmmaker had gotten his hands on the material.

And that brings me to Rob Savage.

Rob Savage and the HOST Hangover

I understand why Savage keeps getting hired to make horror movies.

HOST, his pandemic-era supernatural film, was an inventive, effective little nightmare. It understood its limitations and used them as strengths.

Good stuff.

But then came THE BOOGEYMAN, adapted from one of Stephen King’s most frightening short stories.

And somehow Savage managed to take a story that had absolutely terrified me on the page and turn it into a movie that barely registered.

I was disappointed then.

I’m disappointed now.

At some point, I have to wonder whether Savage is still riding the wave of goodwill that followed HOST.

Because that train is running out of gas, folks.

There are filmmakers working today who seem to understand horror on an almost instinctive level. They understand how to use darkness, silence, negative space, and the way our eyes search a frame for danger. They understand that fear is as much about what happens inside the audience’s imagination as what happens on the screen.

I would have loved to see someone with that kind of command tackle Incidents Around the House.

Malerman gave the filmmakers a terrific monster, a deeply unsettling premise, and a family whose dysfunction adds to the horror instead of merely providing exposition between scares.

The ingredients were there.

The movie just doesn’t bring them all together.

Did This Really Need to Be Rated R?

One other thing that stuck with me was the rating.

OTHER MOMMY is rated R, and I honestly think that was a missed opportunity.

There is some gore. There’s plenty of profanity. And after a while, it felt like we were dropping F-bombs simply because the rating gave us permission.

I love a good F-bomb.

Heck, I love twelve of them when they’re earned.

But adding another dozen doesn’t automatically make a movie scarier, more mature, or more effective.

I kept thinking this could have worked beautifully as a PG-13 horror movie in the vein of INSIDIOUS.

Scary. Accessible to a wider teenage audience. Packed with atmosphere and dread rather than trying to prove how adult it is.

That doesn’t mean horror needs to be sanitized. Some of my favorite horror movies are spectacularly nasty.

But the best horror filmmakers know that an R rating is a tool, not an achievement.

In this case, I don’t think the extra gore and language added enough to justify narrowing the potential audience.

And they certainly didn’t make me want to stand up and applaud at the end.

A Good Movie Hiding Inside a Great Book

Here’s the thing.

I didn’t hate OTHER MOMMY.

Not even close.

There’s a lot here to appreciate. The opening act is terrific. The monster is wonderfully creepy. Jessica Chastain delivers. The decision to let everyone experience the threat, rather than dragging out the usual disbelief routine, is refreshing.

But I expected to love it.

Especially in a year that has been so ridiculously good for horror.

We’ve been living through a golden age of the genre, and 2026 has given us another reminder of just how creative, bold, and downright frightening modern horror can be.

OTHER MOMMY had an opportunity to be part of that conversation.

Instead, it settles somewhere in the middle.

Maybe that’s what frustrates me most. This isn’t a terrible adaptation of a great book. It’s an occasionally excellent adaptation that never quite reaches the potential of its source material.

And those can be more disappointing than the outright disasters.

Read Incidents Around the House. Seriously. If you love supernatural horror, it’s one of the scariest books I’ve ever read.

As for OTHER MOMMY?

Great first half. Sputtering second half. Jessica Chastain doing the heavy lifting.

I liked it.

I really wanted to love it.

And that’s the problem.

Grade: C+

I chatted about this movie yesterday on the KVNU For The People Movie Show and you can listen to the podcast of my review here, and you can check out past shows by clicking here.