Mark Reviews Movies: UMMA

Umma, Sony Pictures Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 23, 2022

Umma is a horror movie that seems to fight against the very idea of being one. In writer/director Iris K. Shim's ghost story, the phantom is an abusive mother, haunting and influencing her daughter, who is now also a mother, and the ways in which the woman sees herself, her child, and the relationship between them. There's no room for subtext here, and that's both a sign of the movie's potential and its ultimate weakness.

Here, we meet Amanda (Sandra Oh, who's quite effective when her character isn't used as a plot device and a vessel for the supernatural), a child of Korean immigrants to the United States. Her familial past is eventually explained in significant detail, although the opening scene doesn't leave too much to the imagination. In her early days of motherhood, Amanda has nightmares of her mother (played by MeeWha Alana Lee)—her umma, in the native tongue she has more or less rejected.

In flashes of images of a locked door and an exposed electrical cord, we hear a young Amanda pleading to her mother to be let out and, accompanying sharp buzzes of electricity, screaming in pain. Shim doesn't want to hide or evade the trauma that comes to define this story, but a lot of other stuff does eventually get in the way of that reality.

Most of that other stuff, of course, involves ghostly appearances, additional nightmares, and moments of Amanda seeming to become increasingly possessed by the spirit of her mother. All of this comes to pass after Amanda learns, from a disapproving uncle (played by Tom Yi) who has come to break the news and criticize his niece, that her mother has died—alone and calling her daughter's original Korean name.

Amanda literally put everything to do with her mother behind her—well, beneath her, packed and locked up in the cellar below her farmhouse. She and her own daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart) have lived a quiet, isolated, and happy existence on that farm, keeping bees and having Danny (Dermot Mulroney) sell the honey at his local store. They read books together and eat dinner by candlelight, since Amanda also shut off the farm's electricity long ago. She says it makes her ill, which is accurate, although not quite in the way she suggests.

With the arrival of the uncle—as well as her mother's remains and prized possessions in a box—at the farm, though, the mother's past—although neither forgotten nor forgiven—abuse comes back into the forefront of Amanda's mind and life. Shim is clearly torn from this point onward, as the story directly confronts how that trauma, along with all of the behaviors and attitudes that Amanda learned from her mother, gradually affects the protagonist's relationship with her own daughter. Well, it directly confronts that notion in an inherently indirect manner.

It's not Amanda, obviously, who is becoming increasingly possessive, needy, and insulting toward Chris. Those moments are simply the doings of her umma, who appears briefly, disappearing just as quickly, in the background and whose harsh voice echoes in Amanda's head, telling her that she's "not the only disobedient child" in the house. Chris wants to go away to college—a desire she has been hiding from her mother (Odeya Rush plays Danny's niece, who makes the case that Chris shouldn't feel guilty of or scared about going out to see the real world). The grandmother won't have that, but will the mother?

That's the unfortunate divide Shim establishes by making this an actual ghost story, with the narrative depending upon the direct influence of the supernatural, plenty of scare attempts (which aren't effective), and a third act that amplifies both of those elements—before dismissing them entirely for the story's actual point. It's pretty clear that Shim is far more intrigued by and concerned with the domestic and psychological side of this tale, and to be blunt, the transformation of such matters into a horror story as hastily developed and plotted as this one only undermines them.

The movie never loses track of its purpose, which is about the persistence of intergenerational attitudes and behaviors, but it constantly feels uncertain of its own intentions and methods. In other words, Umma knows exactly what it wants to say about abuse and its long-term effects on a person and relationships, but the way Shim goes about communicating that message is both ineffective and intrinsically questionable.

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