A new horror film 'The Other Mother' starring Jessica Chastain is now showing in Kazakhstani cinemas. Even before its premiere, it gained fame for its viral marketing — a striking trailer received a positive response and racked up many views, especially after it was shown before screenings of 'The Odyssey,' leaving audiences frightened. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
After its release, critics practically destroyed the film, which, however, does not prevent it from earning quite a good box office worldwide, leaving failures like 'Digger' and 'Social Payback' far behind. Kursiv's review explores whether there is anything good to be found in this film and how many jump scares the director promised.
Seven-year-old Bella (Arabella Olivia Clark) wishes her parents, Russ (Jay Duplass) and Ursula (Jessica Chastain), good night. Left alone in her bedroom, she adds: 'Night-night, Other Mother.' A creature that looks exactly like her mother lives in her closet and visits the girl, promising to love and care for her. However, the Other Mother somehow desperately needs Bella's heart, and soon she will transform into a far more terrifying creature.
While the honor of the epically sinking 'Digger' is being defended online by ordinary viewers and industry colleagues, and 'Social Payback' flounders just as helplessly in the shallows, the opposite is happening with 'The Other Mother' — Rob Savage's horror film has already earned about $60 million at the box office despite devastating reviews. Savage is no newcomer to the genre, already having in his portfolio an adaptation of Stephen King's short story 'The Boogeyman' and the screenlife horror 'Host,' which was also not too warmly received overall but is revered by some fans.
However, the main culprit for this success should be considered not the director, who carelessly boasted before the premiere that he had packed about 50 jump scares into the plot (firstly, that's not true; secondly, relying on jump scares, especially in such quantities, is not a good idea), but the marketing department of Blumhouse–Atomic Monster studio, which has a knack for creating buzz around its releases, promoting them through viral advertising. This time they managed to memify Jessica Chastain's grimace and proliferate her image as a creepy creature pretending to be human. The result was a rather powerful wave of hype, which echoed in the fact that for many viewers the trailer they saw turned out to be better than the film itself.
Which actually isn't as bad as they say. It's an unpretentious, at times weak, but not terrible spectacle, whose main problems are a chaotic script with rather poorly written characters and an inability to settle on a tone of storytelling that jumps from comedic to more serious. Savage proves himself a quite competent director, sometimes capable of interesting decisions: for example, for the simple but effective use of extreme close-ups he can only be praised, and the main highlight of 'The Other Mother' is the child's point of view on what is happening, which, in fact, was also in the original book released two years ago. To the displeasure of its fans, the plot, including the dark ending, was changed, and the Other Mother transformed from a chthonic entity into a doppelganger with Chastain's face.
For the Oscar-winning actress, for whom this appears to be at least her third foray into the matriarchal theme after 'Mama' and 'Mother's Instinct,' the villainous role gives visible pleasure, although why she needed all this is an interesting question. The human version fares much, much worse, although it is precisely on her that what can be called through gritted teeth the dramatic component of the film is loaded — of course, 'The Other Mother,' despite some raucousness in the good sense and demonstrative negligence toward hackneyed genre rules (say, parents turn out to be immediately ready to believe in a monster rather than attributing it to a child's imagination, because they themselves encounter it), does not avoid the clichéd conversation about how all horror comes from traumatic reality. The crisis marital relationship is written equally carelessly and absurdly — no one expects 'Scenes from a Marriage' from this, in the remake of which Chastain starred, but as a plot pretext it works with incredible strain.
In terms of level, 'The Other Mother' is, of course, much closer to 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' than to hits like 'Behind the Scenes of Reality' or 'Obsession,' but still it's not the worst film of this year. Savage at times knows how to remind us that horror is not just scripted clichés and a set of jump scares, although he fails to truly unlock these possibilities. However, the doppelganger plot ultimately played a cruel joke on the creators — the trailer pretended so convincingly to be a good horror film that viewers believed it.