Other Mommy: Why Jessica Chastain’s Horror Film Got a D+ From Audiences and Still Won the Weekend

Here is a sentence that should not make sense: audiences gave Other Mommy a D+, then went and made it the biggest film in America anyway. Jessica Chastain’s new horror movie opened on October 9 to the lowest CinemaScore of any film in two years, according to The Hollywood Reporter, plus an 18 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. By Saturday, Deadline was projecting a first weekend of around $28 million on a reported budget of $19 million. If you are confused, welcome. You are in excellent company, including several studio accountants.

Three questions follow from that. Why is an Oscar winner playing a monster with a terrifying smile? Why do horror fans keep buying tickets to films they claim to hate? What does it tell you about the movie business right now?

What Other Mommy actually is

Other Mommy is directed by Rob Savage, the British filmmaker behind the lockdown Zoom chiller Host and The Boogeyman. It is produced by James Wan through Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, which in horror terms is roughly like having both Chanel and Dior sign off on your outfit. The screenplay by Nathan Elston adapts Incidents Around the House, a 2024 novel by Josh Malerman, the author of Bird Box.

Chastain plays two roles: Ursula, a loving mother, plus the entity that takes on her appearance to win the trust of her young daughter Bela, played by Arabella Olivia Clark. Jay Duplass plays the father and Karen Allen, forever Marion from Raiders of the Lost Ark, appears as the grandmother. The film was shot in Dublin in 2025 and was originally scheduled for May before Universal moved it to October, which is a little like moving a pumpkin-spice launch to the right month.

The premise taps one of the oldest fears in storytelling. Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and the 2009 stop-motion film based on it gave a whole generation nightmares with an Other Mother who has buttons for eyes. Jordan Peele’s Us turned the doppelgänger into social commentary. Chastain summed up the appeal in an interview with SYFY Wire: a child’s parents should be their “one safe harbor”, which is exactly why a fake parent is so frightening.

The smile that went viral

The film’s marketing has rested almost entirely on Chastain’s face. Its trailer went viral earlier this year largely because of her unsettling grin as the Other Mommy. According to CinemaBlend, the team first considered light prosthetics before Chastain asked to try it without them. Her acting note to herself is worth stealing for any role, horror or otherwise: “What if it’s painful for her to hold this shape?”

That is a very Chastain approach. This is an actor who won the Academy Award for disappearing under heavy prosthetics in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Here she does the opposite and lets her own face do the work. It is also not her first trip into the dark. She led the 2013 ghost story Mama, haunted Guillermo del Toro’s gothic Crimson Peak and played the adult Beverly in It Chapter Two. Prestige actors in genre films are no longer slumming it. If anything, horror has become one of the few places where a star’s name still opens a movie.

Why critics shrugged

The reviews are where the champagne goes flat. At RogerEbert.com, Simon Abrams praises Savage’s direction and sound design but calls the film a skilful yet limited “technical showcase” with underdeveloped family dynamics. Early reviews collected by Fiction Horizon range from “uneven but watchable” to considerably less polite. The recurring theme: Chastain is good, the scares are loud and the characters are thin. Savage himself told Entertainment Weekly the film contains “like 50” jump scares. Whether that sounds like a promise or a threat probably decides whether you will enjoy it.

The CinemaScore paradox

CinemaScore surveys audiences on opening night and grades films from A+ to F. Horror has a long and rocky relationship with it, because the people who show up on night one often expect a rollercoaster and sometimes get an art installation. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! famously received an F in 2017. According to The Hollywood Reporter, as cited by Just Jared and Cosmic Book News, the last film to score as low as Other Mommy was Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in 2024, which flopped.

Other Mommy is not flopping, at least not in its first weekend. Deadline’s figures show Thursday previews of $3.6 million and a Friday of about $12.3 million. The audience skewed young: 38 percent were aged 18 to 24. That is the key. Horror has become a social event for younger viewers, who buy tickets because a trailer went viral and their friends are going, not because a critic gave permission. The verdict comes after the purchase.

Here is our interpretation, clearly marked as such. A D+ usually predicts a steep drop in the second weekend, because bad word of mouth travels fast. With a $19 million budget, however, the opening weekend gross alone already exceeds the production cost, even though cinemas keep a large share of ticket sales and marketing costs come on top. Blumhouse has built an entire business model on exactly this maths: keep budgets small, sell the hook and let the opening do the heavy lifting. Whether Other Mommy holds up or collapses next weekend is still open. All figures here are studio estimates and the final numbers arrive on Monday.

What it says about stars (and about you)

Ben Affleck’s recent comments about the decline of the movie star made plenty of headlines. Other Mommy offers a twist on that debate. Chastain’s name and face clearly sold tickets. The film around her apparently did not convince the people who bought them. Star power, it turns out, can still get you into the cinema. It just cannot make you like what you see.

And if you are tempted to go anyway, a tip from the critics: watch it with friends. A D+ film shared in a packed room with fifty jump scares is a very different experience from a D+ film watched alone on a laptop. That is, after all, the whole point of a scary movie on a Friday night in October.