In Review: ‘Other Mommy,’ ‘The Last First: Winter K2’

Other Mommy
Dir. Rob Savage
93 min.

If nothing else, Other Mommy deserves credit for not wasting time. An adaptation of Josh Malerman’s 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, the film begins by setting up a creepy situation that appears destined to take up much of its running time. Bella (Arabella Olivia Clark) seems like a normal, giggly seven-year-old nestled into a happy family. The only child of Russell (Jay Duplass), an affectionate stay-at-home “daddo,” and Ursula (Jessica Chastain), an executive who works long hours, Bella likes to dance and play with toys and feels nervous about her upcoming first day at school. But, after her parents go to bed, Bella has talks with an initially unseen presence she calls “Other Mommy.” It’s pretty clear what’s going to happen next: when Bella starts telling others about “Other Mommy,” no one will believe her until it’s too late.

Except that’s not what happens. Before the film hits the credits, Other Mommy (also played by Chastain, at least in most scenes), after showing up to cook some pasta for lunch, reveals herself to Russell, who has no doubt about what he’s seen and understandably freaks out. (Other Mommy’s unavoidable trailer features this scene, the film’s best, almost in its entirety.) Before long, others start to see Other Mommyas well. That drops the story into largely uncharted territory. Unfortunately, it also gives Other Mommy nowhere to go except to put its characters on the run from a creepy entity that can seemingly do just about anything to torment Bella and her family in an attempt to get Bella to “let her into her heart.” What starts as a tense, creepy thriller turns into an increasingly absurd battle with a special effects oogum-boogum that gets less scary as the movie progresses.

Malerman’s novel works in large part because of a limited perspective that locks readers into its child protagonist’s confused point of view. Savage, director of the OK Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman, and screenwriter Nathan Elston, a veteran of Succession, sort of recreate this by sticking close to Bella most of the time, an approach helped by Clark’s unaffected, vulnerable performance. Chastain’s not bad in her dual role, either. But the film never lets the family drama that Bella’s just starting to pick up on—Urusla keeps late hours and seems a little too close to a family friend named Frank (Arian Moayed)—feel particularly connected to the malevolent being dogging them wherever they go and Savage has trouble making unlikely haunting locations like an ultra-modern house and a Chuck E. Cheese-like indoor playplace, seem scary. Other Mommy deserves credit for avoiding cliches but it also suggests that some clichés endure for a reason. —Keith Phipps

Other Mommy is cooking up something in theaters now.

The Last First: Winter K2
Dir. Amir Bar-Lev
97 min.

Mountaineering documentaries have become their own subgenre in the nonfiction realm, each a tale of derring-do with the inherent advantages of live-or-death stakes, breathtaking images, and personalities that leave you marveling over their lust for risk-taking and their resourcefulness under extreme duress. Free Solo, Meru, and Touching the Void are three of the more prominent titles, all essential, but the list goes deeper than that, and they’ve made minor celebrities out of adventurers like Alex Honnold and Jimmy Chin. If you know nothing about what happened on the world’s second highest peak, K2 in Pakistan, in early 2021, the title of Amir Bar-Lev’s unsettling new documentary The Last First: Winter K2 might seem like another mountaineering triumph caught on film. Among climbers, K2 is considered a more dangerous ascent than Mount Everest and it had never been scaled in winter, which had made it a rare prize for those who seek the unprecedented. 

Yet Bar-Lev has made something closer to the doc equivalent of Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s gripping firsthand account of the 1996 climbing season on Mount Everest, which ended in eight deaths and bitter, conflicting accounts from many of those who survived it. Though The Last First is hazier than it should be about who ultimately lost their lives on K2—the imperative to add suspense leads to some ethical hiccups the film might have done better avoiding—it’s an extremely rich and complex story about what happens when COVID madness, nationalism, and the specialized business of summit tourism meet an icy, windy, unfathomably treacherous mountain that doesn’t take kindly to hubris. Bar-Lev creates a narrative out of other narratives unraveling. 

Beyond the “last first” carrot at the end of the stick, the convergence of so many different parties on K2 in January 2021 is partly explained by the COVID pandemic, which had eased just enough to make the climb an enticing first excursion out of quarantine. Bar-Lev focuses on a doomed trio of seasoned climbers who arrived at basecamp early and methodically prepared themselves to hit the summit a few weeks later. Having scaled many of the world’s toughest peaks, John Snorri, an Icelandic climber and father of six, sought to reach K2 with Ali and Sajid Sadpara, a father-son unit who were under pressure to plant the flag for their native Pakistan. Another team of accomplished and well-financed mountaineers, led by the controversial British-Nepalese star Nirmal “Nims” Purja, turned up, too, with ambitions of their own, which developed into a secret plan to summit for Nepal. Still more climbers booked their opportunity through Seven Summit Treks, a commercial company that leads climbers through 8000m-plus expeditions in the Himalayas and elsewhere. 

Other fascinating personalities emerge in The Last First, too, including Elia Saikaly, a filmmaker who becomes a crucial witness to the tragedy that unfolds, and Arnold Coster, a Dutch representative for Seven Summit Treks who’s forced to account for some deadly mistakes. Though Bar-Lev ably covers the technical details of climbing a mountain like K2, he doesn’t obsess over them like other mountaineering stories, because he’s neither a mountaineer himself nor a director of nature documentaries. The Last First has more in common with previous Bar-Lev documentaries like My Kid Could Paint That and The Tillman Story, all three about disparities between the stories people tell about themselves (and others) and the difficulty over arriving at a shared truth. A four-year-old phenom in the art world, an NFL star gunned down by “friendly fire” in Afghanistan, and a base full of K2 mountaineers are all at the center of controversies where motives and behaviors are in serious conflict. Bar-Lev does his best to sort them out, but as with his previous documentaries, The Last First makes the act of sorting a compelling subject in itself. — Scott Tobias

The Last First: Winter K2 is now streaming on Apple TV+.