When Sesame Street debuted Mr. Snuffleupagus in 1971, originally only Big Bird could see him. Until 1985, Mr. Snuffleupagus, or Snuffy for short, was characterized as Big Bird's imaginary friend. But after child sexual abuse became a more widespread news topic in the late 1980s, Sesame Street creators believed Snuffy's imaginary status might signal to child viewers that adults wouldn't believe them when they confided in them about things that happened to them, like child sexual abuse, and so they decided to make Snuffy visible to all on the fictional inner city block.
Where Jessica Chastain's new horror film, Other Mommy, differs from Sesame Street's initial misstep is that it shows the supernatural entity in 7-year-old Bela's (Arabella Olivia Clark) room to her parents almost immediately, and they react appropriately: with equal amounts of fear, acceptance of the truth, and a survival instinct to protect Bela at all costs.
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Based on Josh Malerman's 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, the book presents the titular entity as a manifestation of Ursula's (Chastain) bad parenting—she's always working late, confesses late in the story that she never wanted to be a mom, and is cheating on Bela's dad, Russ (Jay Duplass). "You smell like someone else," Bela tells Ursula when she comes home late, because if there's one thing children are gonna do, it's clock you.
(from left) Daddo (Jay Duplass), Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), and Mommy (Jessica Chastain)in Other Mommy, directed by Rob Savage.
It's pretty obvious that as Other Mommy literally takes on the visage of Ursula, she plays on both Bela and Ursula's frustrations over the push and pull between motherhood and Ursula's personal desires. It shows that children are aware of discord in the home even though parents think they might be hiding it well. Other Mommy is also an allegory for parentified children, with Ursula and Russ consistently turning to Bela for guidance on how to treat and defeat the entity.
Other Mommy continually asks Bela for what the child misinterprets as "carnations." "Can I go inside your heart?" Other Mommy creepily requests. Russ and Ursula are confused when Bela tells them flowers are what the poltergeist wants, but they eventually figure out that means "incarnation," as in possession.
But the movie, directed by Rob Savage, extrapolates on that. Other Mommy also shapeshifts into the men in Bela's life, including her dad Russ, but perhaps more intriguing are her babysitter Kelvin (Sean Kaufman) and the man with whom Ursula is having an affair, Russ's best friend Frank (Adrian Moayed).
There's a scene early in the film when Frank tries to coax Bela into giving him a hug, a game play of creepy uncles everywhere. This has parallels with a climactic moment when Other Mommy makes her final plea to Bela to let her into her heart by embracing her. "All it takes is a hug," she says. Bela ultimately pushes the entity away, taking ownership of her body and soul over politeness and pleasing others as modern parenting teaches. Bela routinely sets boundaries with Other Mommy, repeatedly declining the entity's requests for "carnation."
Neither Savage's film nor Malerman's book explicitly suggests that Bela has been sexually abused. But the subtext is there for those who care to see it. But the subtext is there for those who care to see it.
Throughout the movie, Other Mommy attempts to lure Bela with sparkles ("I turned Frank into sparkles for you," Other Mommy says at one point, and the entity seems to bleed glitter) and balloons. Other Mommy tries to drown Bela in a ball pit, the brightly-colored spheres evoking the lollipops predators use to reel in unsuspecting children to their stereotypical white van. But here the big bad exists within the home, whether the connoted abuse by a friend of the family or the unhappiness therein, which Bela is obviously picking up on.
Other Mommy presents the corruption of innocence as the thing that will defeat the apparition, and if that's not a metaphor for abuse, I don't know what is. It's not Other Mommy's attempted violation of Bela that will crumble her naivety (though let's be real, she's the most switched-on character in this thing), but Ursula telling Bela the truth: that her conception was a mistake, born out of a previous relationship, and that Russ is not her biological father. Other Mommy told Bela that she'd be able to "make it so I never got hurt" but, as Bela's grandmother and Ursula's estranged mother tells her, getting hurt is part of being human, something Other Mommy could never understand despite wanting to possess a human body so badly. Unfortunately, too many children know this all too well. The least their parents can do is take a page out of Other Mommy's book and believe them.
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