Arabella Olivia Clark

In Other Mommy (2026), building blocks sit between Arabella Olivia Clark’s Bela and Jay Duplass’s Daddo. The small separation makes the distance between father and daughter clear, and Clark gives the child’s unhappiness enough weight for us to notice it. We were moved by that image because her distress felt more convincing than the film’s efforts to frighten us. Her performance is worth noticing in a film we cannot recommend. It gives us a reason to follow her work without pretending she has already established a style.

Her early television credits include Modern Love (2019) and Not Dead Yet (2023). In The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (2025), she plays Young Polly; in Paul Feig’s The Housemaid (2025), she is Young Nina. These are parts that require her to stand in for an adult character’s childhood. Bela is her first lead, and the move gives us a more substantial performance to consider. The useful question now is how well that naturalism will hold when the writing asks something different of her.

Rob Savage gets a naturalistic performance from Clark, then too often hurries back to the creature. Alongside Jessica Chastain, she supplies feeling that Nathan Elston’s screenplay has not done enough to develop through the family itself. The domestic scenes need to matter even without a supernatural threat, and too few of them do. Clark cannot make up for the script’s lack of interest in those people, any more than Chastain can. The repeated scares keep interrupting the actors when a little patience might have made the film more unsettling.

Clark’s confidence with physical work, including flips and underwater sequences, is useful for horror roles. It should not become the chief reason for casting her. The building-block scene suggests that a quieter film could make good use of her, provided the writing gives her more to do than demonstrate how unhappy a household is. For the next part, we would settle for a family worth knowing before anything frightening happens.