Other Mommy review – Jessica Chastain’s demonic double horror isn’t nightmarish enough

There’s some effectively unnerving imagery and a cleverly icy dual lead performance but this kept-from-critics shocker is a bit of a jumbleThe buzz surrounding the viral, limb-bending trailer of pre-Halloween horror Other Mommy was such that screen grabs became memes, official YouTube channel views ran up to 30m-plus and BuzzFeed used the extremely BuzzFeed headline: “The Lady Sitting Next To Me SCREAMED”: This Trailer Playing Before The Odyssey Is Scaring Moviegoers, And These Hilarious Reactions Have Me Crying.Sure, Universal releasing it exclusively attached to the second biggest film of the year played a considerable part but the imagery was efficiently direct and frightening, a derivative scared child/creepy demon set-up turned into something that felt hard to deny and increasingly impossible to avoid. But then what had seemed like the surest slam-dunk horror of the season seemed to slither away. The marketing continued (there was a second trailer that didn’t quite break the internet in the same way) but the reviews never appeared, a choice made to hide the film from critics until the day it opened. It’s a strategic decision that implies a disaster, Universal eager to keep pr…

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