Other Mommy may be going down as one of the most disappointing 2026 releases, but a lot of us saw it in honor of it being the prime season for horror movies. The Blumhouse-Atomic Monster flick was met with savage reviews, but it’s been a box office success that even led to a funny text exchange between Jessica Chastain and a The Social Reckoning star. Now, I need to talk about that ending, because there’s a lot more to it than I thought. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Why Other Mommy’s Ending Aggravated Me
There are a lot of Other Mommy issues, particularly with the tone. But the nail in the coffin for me was the finale. I didn’t hate the bit where Jessica Chastain’s Ursula tells her daughter Bela the truth that her Daddo isn’t her biological father. Or Bela getting the strength to take on Other Mommy herself by tricking her, but by the final frame it’s never clear if Bela successfully fights her off or not. The movie ends with an unclever *wink wink* that just frustrates me.
A ton of movies have been able to tackle the ambiguous ending, but Other Mommy was so vague from beginning to end that having this kind of conclusion made me want to throw popcorn at the screen. Especially because the whole movie has us following a scared eight-year-old child the whole time. If you’re going to break my heart, do it; don’t tease it without being clear about it, you know? I felt like I was being ghosted by a date I barely liked. Icky!
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How The Book Ends
The frustrating ending led me to dig into the book based on the movie, Incidents Around the House. I had heard really good things about the novel by Josh Malerman, and I couldn’t believe the film could have followed the same plotline. What I found out is that while it does very much have the same setup that grabbed me from the beginning about Other Mommy, the movie made a huge change to the ending.
Rather than there being a cryptic result around whether Bela defeats Other Mommy and her parents survive, things are very different. In the book, Other Mommy not only kills her Grandma Ruth, but Bela’s parents, too. Ultimately, an isolated and traumatized Bela agrees to let Other Mommy “into her heart”. The ending sees Bela finding herself in a dark, seemingly infinite space where all she can hear is Other Mommy practicing her voice and then embodying her now with a human subject to possess.
I mean… given, it’s a lot more brutal, but it’s worlds better than the ending we get in my opinion. I wonder if they shot the original ending and this was a complaint in test screenings they ultimately decided to move away from? I get the filmmakers perhaps not wanting to leave audiences with a child being possessed by the end, but it is an R-rated horror movie after all. Softening the blow with the finale didn’t make it better. It just made me mad.
