Is Other Mommy (2026) Woke?

Rob Savage's *Other Mommy* arrives bearing the full weight of the Blumhouse industrial apparatus and the somewhat unearned confidence of a film that debuted at number one despite a 19% critical approval rating. It is, in its way, a perfect object: a horror film about a shape-shifting maternal entity that exploits a child's emotional needs, produced by a studio system that itself excels at exploiting audience emotional needs. The symmetry is not lost on this critic, though it was presumably lost on the marketing department.

The film's most legible contribution to the current cultural conversation is its domestic arrangement. The mother, Ursula, is career-driven and perpetually distracted. The father, Daddo, is warm, present, and conspicuously unbothered by traditional masculine expectation. The monster, naturally, fills the gap that a working mother leaves behind, offering the child unlimited affection in exchange for access. Whether this constitutes a feminist critique of maternal guilt, a conservative anxiety about mothers who work too much, or simply a plot mechanism that required a parental imbalance to function, the film declines to specify. It earns modest marks for the gender-role inversion while declining to do much with it.

Beyond that single structural choice, the film's progressive credentials are thin. The ensemble is casually diverse in the way that modern studio horror tends to be casually diverse: present, unremarkable, not a statement. The monster does not represent capitalism, climate anxiety, or the gender pay gap. It represents a monster. In an era when horror films are frequently conscripted into allegorical service, *Other Mommy* mostly just wants to frighten you, and by most accounts fails to do even that with consistency. There is something almost refreshing about a film this commercially successful and this ideologically inert. Almost.