‘Umma’ Review
Stars: Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, MeeWha Alana Lee, Tom Yi, Odeya Rush, Dermot Mulroney | Written and Directed by Iris K. Shim
Sandra Oh fears she’s turning into her mother in Umma, the Sam Raimi-produced debut from writer-director Iris K. Shim. Using horror tropes to explore various elements of personal trauma, it’s light on scares, but compensates with strong character work and an emotionally engaging central dynamic.
Oh plays Amanda, a first-generation Korean-American woman who lives with her home-schooled teenage daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) on a remote farm where they sell their own organic honey, with the help of a kind-hearted local shopkeeper (Dermot Mulroney). As the film begins, their main problem is that Amanda’s apparent allergy to electricity has begun to impact Chrissy’s burgeoning social life, especially after she befriends the shopkeeper’s visiting niece (Odeya Rush) and suddenly needs a phone for the first time in her life.
However, things take a turn for the worse when Amanda’s uncle (Tom Yi) arrives from Korea and tells her that her estranged mother has died, handing over her cremated remains and insisting that they be interred according to tradition. Unable to deal with repressed childhood trauma, Amanda stashes the ashes in the basement and tries to forget about them, but she soon begins to feel haunted – and perhaps possessed – by her mother’s increasingly angry spirit.
Shim’s script uses a combination of haunted house and possession tropes to dig into a handful of emotionally resonant themes. These include the deep-seated, lasting trauma of child abuse (not just the crippling emotional damage, but also the fear of perpetuating it), the anxiety of assimilation (especially when it involves the adaptation to a different culture) and the loss of a parent-child bond once the child begins to grow up and assert their independence.
Those issues are brought to life by a pair of touching, well-rounded performances from the two leads. Oh is superb as Amanda, desperately trying to protect her daughter by attempting to bury, rather than confront, her own issues, while Stewart does a terrific job of conveying Chrissy’s journey from naïve, isolated innocent to someone with a hunger to explore what the outside world might have to offer.
In addition, there’s charming support from both Mulroney and Rush, both playing characters that another film might have invested with sinister intent – it’s actually refreshing that that doesn’t happen here. By contrast, MeeWha Alana Lee is suitably chilling as Amanda’s “Umma” (Korean for “Mommy”), both in flashbacks and in present-day evil spirit form.
Throughout Umma, Shim isn’t especially concerned with jump scares, settling instead for creepy, increasingly oppressive atmosphere and an effectively unsettling gimmick of having dark shapes moving in the background of various scenes. Similarly, the film never gets close to achieving real terror (arguably, that’s not its goal in the first place), but there are nonetheless a handful of genuinely unnerving moments that feel original, such as Umma’s menacing delivery of the line, “We started as one, and we’ll end as one,” implying that you can never escape your past or the parental bond.
Ultimately, Umma works better as an emotional mother-daughter drama than it does as a horror movie, but it’s worth seeing for the compelling performances from the two leads and there are a handful of moments that will stay with you. It also marks a promising debut for writer-director Shim and it will be interesting to see what she does next.
*** 3/5
Umma is cinemas now.
