Jessica Chastain's new horror film is on pace to lead the box office this weekend even as reviews turn brutal, and yes, there's a stinger after the credits roll.
Jessica Chastain's Other Mommy landed in theatres this week, and the early word is a split screen. Box office trackers expect it to top the charts. Critics, meanwhile, are not being kind. Most reviews filed so far lean negative, and a Rotten Tomatoes score hasn't even been locked in yet.
The film follows an eight-year-old named Bela, played by Arabella Olivia Clark, who starts seeing something in her house that wears her mother's face and talks in her mother's voice. Chastain plays both parts, the real mother and the thing pretending to be her, which is the kind of dual casting that either works brilliantly or collapses the whole movie depending on who you ask. Right now, critics seem split on which one happened.
Here's the part genre fans actually came to find out: should you sit through the credits? Short answer, yes. According to Just Jared, there's a brief scene at the very end of the credits roll where the creature looks straight into the camera and whispers "shhh" to the audience. It's not a trailer for a sequel, no new footage, no cast reveal. Just that one unsettling beat, confirming the thing from the house is still watching, even after the lights would normally come up.
The source material here is Josh Malerman's book Incidents Around the House, which should tell you something about the tone CutMirchi readers can expect going in. Malerman wrote Bird Box, so dread that lives in domestic spaces isn't new territory for him. Other Mommy appears to be leaning into that same register, a monster that doesn't break down doors so much as it moves in and takes over a routine.
For Chastain, this isn't her first run at prestige horror. She did Mama back in 2013 and returned for It: Chapter Two in 2019, both directed by Andy Muschietti. Other Mommy isn't a Muschietti film, but it slots into a pattern where Chastain keeps picking horror projects built around maternal figures gone wrong, which is either a coincidence or a very specific actor preference at this point.
What happens next depends entirely on how the numbers hold up once the review aggregate finally posts. A movie can open big and still get buried once word of mouth catches up with it, especially in horror, where opening weekend and second weekend can look like two different movies entirely. Whether Other Mommy's box office run survives the critical drubbing, or whether that credits whisper ends up being the most talked-about forty seconds of the whole film, is the thing worth watching over the next few days.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.