Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider’s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.
The smile Jessica Chastain gives the monster in Other Mommy is entirely too eager to be well-meaning. You can see what it’s going for, but it misses the mark big time. This thing wants a child to look at it and see somebody who’s happy to see her, and while it technically has the right face for the job, Chastain's horrifying creature just can’t quite get the rest of it right.
Playing both Mommy and Other Mommy gave Chastain a chance to explore what she calls a “very complicated relationship to motherhood.” She and director Rob Savage thought about what it would cost the entity to keep up the performance. “There’s like a desperation to her,” Chastain says. You can see it in how badly Other Mommy wants that smile to work. Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) is the person she needs to convince, and Bela knows her mother’s face better than anyone.
Collider is thrilled to exclusively debut a clip from “A Family in Pieces,” a new behind-the-scenes featurette included with Other Mommy’s home release. In the clip, Savage remembers Chastain showing him the smile on his first day on set. “I saw the face, I knew this movie was gonna be freaky as hell,” he says. “It’s a smiley face. But there’s nothing happy about it, I’ll tell you that.” Check out the featurette below.
Four franchises, four completely different ways of getting underneath your skin. This is the one built out of your particular fear, why it works so well on you, and what it would leave behind.
Your nightmare does not wait outside the door. It waits for you to close your eyes, which you are going to have to do eventually, because nobody has ever won that particular argument.
Your nightmare is not really the doll. It is the face of the person you tell, and the way they decide, very kindly, that you have imagined all of it.
Your nightmare has your number, knows your name, and has almost certainly been inside your house before. The worst part is that you already know them.
Your nightmare is not really about you. It is about the people asleep down the hall, and the feeling that whatever is here is not interested in leaving.
Savage remembers asking Chastain to let Bela see “the tiniest little crack in the facade between Mummy and Daddo,” played by Jay Duplass. What he got was a flicker in her eyes. That’s all Bela needs to see to know something’s off between her parents, even if she can’t tell you what it is. Put that next to the smile, and you get two different reasons for a kid to watch her mother’s face so closely. One expression gives away more than Mommy meant to. The other gives away how hard Other Mommy is trying.
Clark had her own read on the difference between Chastain and the character. She calls Chastain “the best mentor I could ever hope to learn from” and says that even when her scene partner was terrifying as Other Mommy, “Jessica always makes me feel really safe on set.” It’s a sweet moment in a featurette about a performance built around making a familiar face feel unsafe, and especially weaponizing that toward a child.
Other Mommy is available now on digital and arrives on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD on December 29. Stay tuned at Collider for more.
