Umma: Sandra Oh is Scared to Death of Turning into Her Mother - Literally
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C-plus
When a studio releases a movie without screening it for critics and with minimal promotion, it usually signals the obvious, that it’s a bad movie and that word-of-mouth is discouraged.
(This isn’t always the case. Now a cult classic, Mike Judge’s disturbingly prescient comedy Idiocracy was one such film swept under the carpet on opening day, thanks to studio politics.)
Things are more complicated with Iris K. Shim’s Umma, a psychological horror film about a woman (Sandra Oh) who finds herself turning into her mother in a literal, supernatural sense.
Sandra Oh is stalked by the spirit of her mother in Umma.
It’s actually a pretty promising and layered theme, one that is never quite given the mature treatment it deserves because of the way the film is squeezed through the horror-trope machine. Do I smell studio interference? Maybe even the dreaded “notes.”
Those who’d watched the trailer or read basic details of the film might have expected Asian horror along the lines of The Ring or The Grudge (Sam Raimi, who backed this film as a producer, similarly supported the latter). There are numerous jump scares, slamming doors and déjà vu horror images, like the one in which hive-fuls of honeybees behave like Amityville flies.
But this is a suspense thriller that has no body-count to speak of, and little to offer in terms of shocks other than the angry and sometimes violent appearances of the Korean-speaking dead-mom herself. I suspect there was once an intent to make Umma (“Mother” in Korean) into something a little more gothic in tone.
After a short opening scene in which we hear sparking noises behind a door and a little girl pleading in Korean for her mother not to hurt her, we move to the present day where single mom Amanda (Oh), lives “off the grid” but otherwise utterly Americanized somewhere in California with her teen daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart). There she works as a bookkeeper, and, in partnership with her daughter, as a successful beekeeper.
She has weird business practices though, forbidding cars and all electrical/electronic devices on her property. Living a 19th Century lifestyle has begun to chafe on Chris, who is secretly planning to enrol in college, with the help of Amanda’s client Danny (Dermot Mulroney), whose niece River (Odeya Rush) has become her first close friend.
Still, there’s peace in the beehive, until the arrival of an angry, disapproving uncle (Tom Yi), who delivers the ashes and ceremonial effects of Amanda’s recently deceased mother (MeeWha Alana Lee). That’s some bad mojo to deliver to someone who’d fled her mother and erased her own given name Soo-hyun, effectively erasing her culture as well.
Soon, Umma is making herself known to her daughter, who pronounces that they were together at birth and will be together at death. Chris’s moves toward “abandoning” her own mother – “Another disobedient girl!” - provide the psychological template for Amanda to start listening to her mother’s rage-filled siren call.
For the longest time, this internal dialogue between Amanda and Umma suggests that the whole subsuming of her identity might be entirely in Amanda’s head. But this kind of subtlety doesn’t last. Despite Oh’s solid fear-filled performance, Amanda’s inevitable possession seems to take forever in an 87-minute movie, and the inevitable maternal-love-powered dispossession seems rushed.
Umma. Written and directed by Iris K. Shim. Starring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, MeeWha Alana Lee. In theatres now.