Universal Pictures dropped a second trailer for Other Mommy Tuesday morning and tickets are now on sale. The first look told us Jessica Chastain was back in horror. This one tells us what kind.
The new footage opens on Bela in the bathtub with someone who looks like her mother. It plays almost gentle for a beat. Then her actual mother walks into the room. That is where the trailer stops pretending and where the whole premise of the movie clicks into place.
Chastain is playing the thing in the house
Here is the part iHorror readers should care about. Chastain is in a dual role. She plays Bela’s mother and she plays Other Mommy, the entity that has decided it wants to be Bela’s mother instead.
So she is not the scared parent trying to protect a kid from something. She is also the something. That is a different assignment from the one she took in Mama or Crimson Peak and the trailer leans on it hard. Two versions of the same face. One of them wants a relationship with a little girl and there is no clean way to tell which.
The uncertainty is the engine. Bela cannot sort out which mother is real and the trailer does not immediately give her an easy way to distinguish one from the other. Just a woman who looks exactly like the woman she is impersonating.
What it is adapted from
Other Mommy comes from Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, which grew out of a real bedtime moment in Malerman’s family. Malerman is also the author of Bird Box so his name already carries plenty of weight with horror readers. Nathan Elston wrote the screenplay.
Rob Savage directs, which is the other reason to pay attention. He made Host on a video call during lockdown and then made The Boogeyman for a studio, so he has done both the scrappy version of this and the polished one. James Wan produces and the film comes from Blumhouse Atomic Monster.
Arabella Olivia Clark plays Bela. Jay Duplass plays her father Daddo. Dichen Lachman, Arian Moayed and Karen Allen fill out the supporting cast.
The trailer does its job without giving away how the thing in the house operates, which is more restraint than most second trailers manage this close to release.
Other Mommy opens in theaters October 9, 2026 from Universal Pictures.
