Is ‘Other Mommy’ based on ‘Coraline’? Jessica Chastain’s new horror story and its origins explained
A mother making lunch should be an ordinary sight. In the ‘Other Mommy’ trailer, it leads to a discovery beneath the kitchen table. The woman Bela has been talking to isn’t quite who she appears to be. That encounter has invited a familiar comparison: the Other Mother from ‘Coraline’.
‘Other Mommy’ isn’t based on ‘Coraline’ or a remake of the animated film. It adapts Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel, ‘Incidents Around the House’. Malerman also wrote ‘Bird Box’, which became the 2018 Netflix film starring Sandra Bullock. This adaptation follows a different family and an entity whose growing interest in a child puts everyone around her in danger.
The comparison comes from the maternal figures at the center of both stories. ‘Coraline’ features an Other Mother who draws a child into a seemingly ideal alternative world. ‘Other Mommy’ introduces a presence that resembles the girl’s actual mother and intrudes on her home. The names and the creatures’ spiderlike movements invite parallels, but those similarities don’t make the films connected.
The film follows Bela, played by Arabella Olivia Clark, and the entity she calls Other Mommy. Its official synopsis, describes “a terrifying trip into the darkening world of a young girl, Bela, who forms a relationship with a sinister entity in her home who looks uncannily like her own mother.” Initially, the presence is supposed to stay in Bela’s room. Once it moves beyond that space, the haunting begins affecting the rest of her family. As the haunting spreads, Bela struggles to distinguish between the presence and Ursula, leaving both parents trying to understand what has entered their home.
In the novel, the story unfolds through eight-year-old Bela’s perspective. Her parents’ troubled marriage is already a source of tension when the presence begins appearing from her closet. It repeatedly seeks permission to enter her heart, a request also heard in the trailer: “Can I go into your heart?” Bela’s refusal makes the entity increasingly aggressive, turning her encounters with it into a threat to the household. The trailer also shows Bela reminding the entity, “You said you wouldn’t leave my room.” Her father later discovers it beneath the kitchen table, its limbs contorted.
Jessica Chastain plays Bela’s mother, Ursula, as well as the entity wearing her likeness. Jay Duplass plays her father, Russ, while Karen Allen appears as Grandma Ruth. Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Sean Kaufman also feature in the cast. Rob Savage, whose previous films include ‘Host’ and ‘The Boogeyman’, directs from Nathan Elston’s screenplay, with Blumhouse and Atomic Monster producing.
‘Other Mommy’ opens in US theaters on Friday, October 9. Universal Pictures is distributing the film. It is rated R for some bloody violence and language.
