Abhiroop Das
Helmed by Rob Savage, ‘Other Mommy‘ travels deep into the uncanny valley with an entity that assumes the form of a little girl’s mother. Bela, seven years old and feeling out of place wherever she goes, finds comfort in her new, supernatural friend, who looks like her mother, Ursula, save for a few differences. Very soon, however, Bela realizes that this friend, one she names Other Mommy, has sinister motivations and is prepared to draw blood. Other Mommy feeds on the microscopic cracks in one’s psyche, and as Bela and her parents try to escape the entity’s clutches, some uncomfortable truths about themselves come to light. While the film may be an adaptation of the horror novel ‘Incidents Around the House’ by Josh Malerman, it ultimately finds its own voice in portraying the end of this tragedy. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Other Mommy Plot Synopsis
‘Other Mommy’ begins with a little girl named Isabela “Bela” Martin feeling overwhelmed by her rapidly changing life. Struggling to adjust to her new school and seeing her parents, Ursula and Russ Martin, fight every day, Bela grows increasingly distant. Somewhere along the way, however, she begins to interact with a supernatural entity who seems to be her mother’s doppelgänger. Bela can often tell who’s who, and names the entity, her only friend, “Other Mommy.” It doesn’t take long for things to take a turn for the eerie, as Other Mommy starts pretending to be Ursula while the real Ursula is at work. Other times, the entity asks Bela to let her into her heart, while her parents remain blissfully unaware.
Everything changes when Russ spots Other Mommy one day, her limbs inhumanly contorted under the table. Though he manages to convince himself that it was an illusion, Other Mommy becomes more threatening, chasing Bela, growing in size, and contorting her surroundings. Another time, while Russ and Ursula are celebrating their anniversary, Other Mommy takes over Bela’s babysitter and tries to forcibly enter her heart, but fails. Seeing this, the family decides to leave the house and stay at Ursula’s friend Frank’s. However, another fight breaks out when Russ accuses Ursula of having an affair. Anguished, Bela gives in to Other Mommy’s provocation and wishes for Frank to disappear, following which he is brutally killed.
Desperate for a solution, the family next heads to Ursula’s mother, Ruth, who claims to be a clairvoyant. The two paranormal investigators she hires describe Other Mommy as a trickster demon and propose an open confrontation as the only way to defeat her. However, that plan also goes bust when Other Mommy kills the two investigators, leaving the Martins with no choice but to return home, where Other Mommy is ready to do battle. Ursula, believing that the only way to stop the carnage is to take away Bela’s innocence, confesses that Bella’s father isn’t Russ, but her ex-husband. The revelation breaks Bela’s heart, causing her to run upstairs and nearly give in to Other Mommy’s wishes, only to fight back in the last moment and defeat the entity, or so it seems.
Other Mommy Ending: Is Other Mommy Still Alive? Will She Come Back?
The ending of ‘Other Mommy’ leaves us on quite an unsettling note, as Other Mommy stares directly into the screen, shushing the viewers in her typical, uncanny fashion. Whether this is a fourth wall-break is up for interpretation. If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that the entity is still alive and well. From the looks of it, Other Mommy is in the same room where Bela attempted to erase her, suggesting we might be looking at the immediate aftermath of her comeback. This puts the flash-forward Christmas sequence in an entirely new light, as now we can no longer be sure of Other Mommy’s whereabouts, or that she isn’t carrying on with the family’s daily lives under a new disguise.
Despite her rather poor early attempts at impersonating a human, Other Mommy gets scarily good at it by the end, tricking the audience into thinking that she is Ruth for a moment. As such, with barely any clue about how the family’s future transpires, one cannot help but assume the worst. The only line of logic that seems to work against Other Mommy’s imminent defeat is that nobody in the house is innocent anymore. With many of the family’s ugly truths out in the open, Other Mommy is considerably weaker and might need to prey on newer people in more ingenious ways if she wants her former strength back. Luckily for her, Ursula’s picture-perfect life appears to be at the cusp of shattering yet again, which leaves Other Mommy with ample chances to strike back.
There are many symbolic and metafictional connotations one can draw from Other Mommy seemingly interacting with the audience through the camera. The most potent reading of the scene, though, takes the entity’s abilities into account. Other Mommy’s goal of getting inside someone’s heart is always about exploiting their weaknesses and, quite literally, hollowing them out, so that incarnation can be easier. By shushing the viewer, she essentially treats them as a person, one who has, over the course of the film, become as curious about the family’s cracks and faults as she is. In a way, the viewer becomes Other Mommy’s accomplice, helping her keep the secret of her survival as she waits for the next best moment to strike.
What Does Ursula’s Smile Mean?
Other Mommy’s return to the fray is merely a symptom of a much bigger issue plaguing the Martin family, as it confirms that there are still unsaid secrets between them, that the entity can extract and exploit. In this case, those secrets aren’t necessarily real or connected to Ursula or anyone’s actions, but rather reflect how they feel on the inside. In the moments before the post-credits scene, Bela, Ursula, and Russ seem to be having their perfect family moment, setting up Christmas lights, yet one look at Ursula’s face effectively confirms that she is still pretending to be happy with her life and her family. For a movie that is all about embracing the family’s darkest sides in earnest, this is a rather cruel conclusion, but at the same time it’s what makes the film brutally honest, in some ways.
Although Ursula eventually finds the courage to come clean about all of her secrets in front of her daughter, this doesn’t necessarily change something fundamental. Ursula’s life, and the many variables in them, remain the same, and all she has now is a relationship with her daughter that is simultaneously stronger and more fragile. Ultimately, the biggest decision she makes is not to say the truth, but to use it to mask an even bigger lie, one that keeps not only her, but also Russ trapped in a deeply unhappy relationship. The most tragic part of all this, however, is that Bela is the one who notices it, catching her mother’s despondent look. Unlike before, however, she has been forcibly matured by life’s worst elements, and understands that her mother is lying once again.
The fact that Bela serves as the narrator of the film isn’t a coincidence but rather a creative choice likely made only for this moment. Right before she catches Ursula’s smile, Bela spots the scar on her neck, left behind by Other Mommy’s bites. When Bela asks her mother how she will explain it, Ursula replies by joking about cooking up a fake story. This throwaway line seems to carry thematic weight, as it is followed by Bela narrating to the audience that she now has a great life, and that her mother and father are genuinely happy, something we know to be untrue. In the end, the saddest thing about Bela’s arc is that she learns to lie and tell stories, which essentially dooms her to continue the cycle, and thus feed the entity known as Other Mommy.
How Does the Book End? Who Survives?
While the film’s ending is grim in its own way, the book has a much, much darker ending. Aside from some broader changes, the story largely remains the same until Ursula, Russ, and Bela return to the Martin house, except this time Ruth is waiting for them. Not long after, Ruth tells Bela that the heart is a house with many rooms, and she should be careful about who she lets in. It doesn’t take long for it to dawn on Bela that the person beside her isn’t her grandmother but Other Mommy. The twist, however, is that Ursula and Russ don’t survive the night. After Bela runs away from Other Mommy and hides in a closet, she hears the entity lure out Ursula and Russ using Ruth’s voice, only to kill them in cold blood, leaving Bela with the worst fate of them all.
When Other Mommy eventually makes her way back to a frightened Bela and asks for permission to enter her heart, this time Bela agrees. It takes days of pure terror and the slow dismantling of everything she has ever loved for Bela to feel truly alone and hopeless. With all the adult humans in her life failing her on some level, a desperate Bela turns to Other Mommy at last, only for more tragedy to befall her. In the final moments of the book, Bela wakes up in a vast, featureless space, hearing someone practice her voice. The chilling implication here is that Other Mommy quite literally takes over Bela’s body in hopes of living as a human, while the real Bela is likely to remain imprisoned in her own heart.
Compared to the utterly dark book ending, the final moments of ‘Other Mommy’ still feel relatively hopeful, though their underlying messages aren’t so different. Perhaps most importantly, Bela is left completely disillusioned about the adults in her life, knowing how she has essentially been betrayed from the very start. Where the book locks her into an abstract, empty space, the film instead forces her to return to regular life, this time with its reality unmasked. While the creators haven’t explained their reasoning behind the dramatic shift in endings, the core, somewhat pessimistic commentary on humanity and the unknown remains the same.
Read More: Where Was Other Mommy Filmed? All Shooting Locations
You must be logged in to post a comment.