Other Mommy book vs movie: every major change from Malerman's Incidents Around the House

Incidents Around the House came out from Del Rey in June 2024 and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. It is narrated by Bela, eight years old, who has spent years fending off a thing that lives in her bedroom closet, calls itself Other Mommy and keeps asking to go into her heart. Bela understands that saying yes would mean trading places with it, so she always says no.

Rob Savage's adaptation, written by Nathan Elston and produced by James Wan, opened on October 9. Arabella Olivia Clark plays Bela, Jay Duplass plays her father, Russ, and Karen Allen plays her grandmother Ruth. Jessica Chastain plays both Bela's mother, Ursula, and the thing that wears her face.

What survives the trip

More than the trailers suggest. The family is the same: Ursula, Russ and Bela, with Ursula's mother Ruth as the adult who takes the haunting seriously. In both versions the marriage is failing, Ursula is having an affair with a man named Frank, and Russ turns out not to be Bela's biological father. In both, the family runs from house to house, and the thing follows Bela rather than staying put.

What Savage changed is mostly how all of that reaches the audience, and then, at the very end, what it adds up to.

The changes, in the order you'll meet them

• Whose story it is — the novel never leaves Bela's head; every adult conversation reaches the reader through what an eight-year-old overhears and misreads. The film watches the family from the outside and hands much of the emotional weight to Ursula.
• The creature's face — Malerman's Other Mommy is closer to a bird, with eyes that wander around its head and a smell bad enough to make people cough. Savage's mostly looks exactly like Ursula. The tells are small: a face that sags, feet that drift off the floor, a body bent the wrong way under a table.
• The playground — in the book, the thing imitates the voice of Bela's friend Deb at a playground, and Bela takes a bad fall. The film turns it into a set piece that starts in a ball pit at a family restaurant, moves to the sea and ends in the family car, filled with ball-pit balls, with the creature inside.
• Frank — in the novel, Ursula announces that her lover has been found dead in a closet, and it all happens offstage. The film's Frank, played by Arian Moayed, takes the family in after their anniversary party goes wrong, and the creature kills him in front of Bela after convincing her the family would be better off without him.
• The experts — the book's family goes through a friend with an interest in the paranormal, a séance run by spiritualists out of their depth and an investigator who touches the thing and simply leaves. In the film, Ruth hires a ghost-hunting team, their séance actually summons the creature, and it turns on them.
• The secret — the book's Ursula tells Bela about her real father on purpose, at Sleeping Bear Dunes, on the theory that a painful adult secret will make the creature lose interest. It doesn't. The film's creature forces the confession out of Ursula in the basement, where Bela can hear, and adds a second one: Ursula never wanted to be a mother.
• Grandma Ruth — in the novel, the creature kills her and wears her. In the film, she goes looking for help instead.

Most of these trade the book's slow dread for something Savage can stage. The secret is the exception, and it's the change that decides the ending.

"If this happened to your kid, your family, what would you do?" Savage said of the novel, speaking to The AU Review.

That's a question about the parents, and it explains why the film keeps drifting away from Bela's point of view. It also explains the last act.

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How the two endings split

In the novel, the creature kills Ruth first, then uses her face and voice to lure Russ and Ursula upstairs. Bela, hiding in a closet beside her grandmother's body, finds her parents dead afterward. Believing she's alone, she goes back to her room, Other Mommy asks one more time, and she says yes. The last pages leave Bela in an empty void while the thing in her body practices her voice.

The film reaches the same question from the opposite direction. After the basement confession, Bela runs upstairs and tells Other Mommy she's ready. The creature comes to her in the bathroom wearing Bela's own face and asks for a hug. Bela lets it get close, then tears it apart. The surrender was a trap, and it works because Bela has stopped needing her parents to be perfect.

In the book, the family's secret is a plan to save Bela, and it fails. In the film, the creature drags it out of Ursula, and it becomes the thing Bela wins with.

Everyone in the film's family survives. Ursula doesn't come out of it happier: the last scene has Bela and Russ laughing while she looks on, visibly unresolved. A post-credits shot of Other Mommy shushing the audience is the closest the film comes to the book's version, in which the thing never leaves.

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