I want to believe that, at the film’s intentional core, Iris K. Shim wanted to make a family drama with translatable horror devices in Umma. Sandra Oh, whose reliable strengths lie in comedic farces and tense situations, takes a turn toward complete seriousness as Amanda, a woman who owns a bee sanctuary at a rural farm. Her teenage daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart) is coming to understand that her life with her mom is not as normal as other kids’ are; she spends her free time prepping honey, and lives without electricity per Amanda’s alleged sickness whenever she is close to electricity. We, as the audience, know that Amanda’s aversion is due to the abuse inflicted by her mother, who had used live wires as physical punishment.
Amanda’s trauma comes to high-beam light when her uncle brings back the ashes and material possessions of her late mother, to whom she had not spoken in years. Shim’s creative execution was going to be how Amanda’s reactions would be manifested. Mixed, contradictory emotions are sure to arise, but in a rather surface-level plot tension, there seems to be a live spirit behind her mother’s hanbok and tal. Even though the serene farm is now under siege by a supernatural presence, Amanda’s unwillingness to share her feelings with her daughter makes for a more complicated ride.
Umma is firstly about generational trauma. However, Amanda’s avoidance in facing her past could be externalizing a psychological alteration to reality, if Shim was trying to lead us in that direction. Though the paranormal element is played with subpar oomph, Oh performs with sufficient screams and tragedy to make Umma more bearable. As a scary movie, the plot of Amanda’s intricacies somehow dampens the thrills. It’s unfortunate, because the strongest segment of this tale is Oh’s final conversation with her mother, which is worthy of a grand finale to an emotionally driven narrative had Shim decided to lead in another direction. Unless it was able to straddle both genres with confident finesse, Umma should have stayed in one lane.
While the obvious answer to Amanda’s problems was for her to talk to someone about her feelings, her conflicting relationship with her mother, who had uprooted her life to move to America, was persuasive to the story’s integrity (if it hadn’t been driven too late in the game). Umma isn’t on the same level as other Korean horror staples that have made it across seas, per se. It is a story featuring Korean immigrants placing their roots into a new country, not realizing that unaddressed wounds can run under the ground they call home.
Umma
2022
dir. Iris K. Shim
83 mins
Now playing in theaters!
