Overview: Bela, an eight-year-old girl living in a home with marital problems, confronts a sinister entity that comes out of her closet. The presence, whom she calls "Other Mommy," becomes increasingly threatening to her and her family.

Verdict: IOh, god. I can’t believe what I saw after sitting through Other Mommy. I mean, the trailer looked creepy and the fact that Jessica Chastain plays a dual role as a mother and a doppelgänger piqued my interest. It’s not like Rob Savage, who did a great job in the screenlife Host and, to an extent, The Boogeyman, is completely losing his directorial flair here.

At least not from the beginning, where he skips the typical build-up commonly associated with the horror genre, and goes straight for the jugular: A pre-title cold open that introduces the adolescent Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), who seemingly has a routine normal night with her parents Ursula (Jessica Chastain) and Russell (Jay Duplass) as they tuck her into bed.

But once they leave with the door closed, an entity appears out of her closet and instead of freaking out, Bela looks unfazed as if she has known the entity for sometimes, even calling it “Other Mommy” since she is a dead ringer for her real mother. Then comes the kitchen scene the next morning, easily the best part of the movie, which ends with Other Mommy contorting her whole body in an unnatural position. So far, so good.

But unfortunately, the rest of the movie is one chaotic mess after another, with narrative coherence thrown out the window in favor of a frenetic pace as if it were built for short attention spans. You can forget about the so-called dread and atmosphere because, apparently, Savage and editor John Cutler navigate Other Mommy like an out-of-control rollercoaster, leaving little room for natural progression.

It doesn’t help that Nathan Elston’s screenplay, adapted from Josh Malerman’s Incidents Around the House novel, comes across as a patchy job. The Other Mommy can’t stop latching onto Bela wherever she goes, no matter day or night, like how Ursula and Russell’s party to celebrate their seventh anniversary turns into a disaster. But it isn’t just the haunting, as Bela also learns that her mother is having an affair with her father’s best friend, Frank (Arian Moayed).

As the movie goes on, Savage keeps it busy with a mix of surrealistic and macabre set pieces, showcasing special effects from the Other Mommy’s face melting like wet clay to an exploding head. At one point, there’s even an elaborate ball pit sequence that turns into a bonkers nightmare straight out of A Nightmare on Elm Street. They look visually cool if you take them at face value, but these scenes barely register a creeping sense of fright other than just look-at-me, flashy visual spectacle.

The so-called jump scares, where Savage boldly claimed there are 50 of them, rely heavily on constantly loud noises and recurring camera movements that already telegraph what we would expect later. Besides, merely piling in plenty of jump scares strips away their effective jolts, especially when the movie barely cares about the cinematic power of escalation and, most importantly, the elements of surprise. These scares become physically numbing after a while, to the point that the tension deflates completely.

The second half sees Savage sinking further, even ripping off a scene from Insidious, which revolves around Ursula’s superstitious mother, Grandma Ruth (Karen Allen), seeking the help of paranormal investigators led by Lois (Dichen Lachman) in an attempt to get rid of the Other Mommy. By the time the movie reaches the third act, best described as underwhelming and anticlimactic, I already lose interest.