Salome Gonstad

Based on the book Incidents Around the House by Bird Box scribe Josh Malerman, Other Mommy created a lot of social media buzz with its first trailer. That insane wagon-wheel version of the titular Other Mommy under the table was quite the visual. Add in the chatter about the source material, which folks were saying is super scary, and I was pretty psyched to see this. Okay, I was interested in seeing it. Admittedly, I had some misgivings watching the trailer. It seemed to rely a lot on jump scares.

“Decide for yourself,” Warner Bros marketed this week, as the Digger reviews began rolling in and were decidedly mixed. Like, they don’t want to say it’s super clever and to get it, you kinda have to be…well, we’re not saying a lot more intellectually gifted, but we’re not not saying that, you know? It’s just probably a little gauche to self-describe. Anyway, the movie Digger. The Dubya B’s earlier marketing made it difficult to assess what it was about besides, “Hey, y’all remember Tom Cruise?

We’ve all heard “if it bleeds, it leads,” the old saw about modern news coverage. But it never had to be literal blood. What we like most is spectacle–the titillating buzz of transgression, writ large. Sure, we all love an inspirational feel-good story, but it doesn’t really tickle us like scandal and shame. In my review of the movie Primetime, the A24 latest, we’ll take a look at its depiction of a show that took that to its (never bleeding) heart.