By portraying the narrative through the eyes of an Asian immigrant, the smokey new horror film “Umma” gives a unique take on one of the genre’s favorite issues of importance trauma.
Amanda (Sandra Oh) and her daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) live off the grid on a farm where they raise bees instead of vegetables in Umma (Korean for mother), and it’s easy to imagine writer-director Iris K. Shim’s feature debut playing out like a horror version of Minari.
The initially awkward arrival of Grandma from South Korea culminates in and underscores the children’s embrace of the cultural identity she symbolizes in Lee Isaac Chung’s Oscar-nominated semi-autobiographical film from 2020.
The farmstead in Umma exemplifies Americana, and when Chrissy’s Grandma (MeeWha Alana Lee) comes to visit, she, too, represents the old world—albeit with malicious motives.
After attempting to flee, she abuses the young Amanda, then known as Soo Hyun (Hana Kim), with shocks from an exposed electrical line, which traumatizes Amanda to the point where she swears off electricity for the rest of her life.
She bans anybody with a running automobile or even a cell phone from approaching her home, finds lightning upsetting, and has nightmares regularly.
Amanda’s estranged uncle (Tom Yi) comes up to her property abruptly, carrying her mother’s ashes and personal belongings in a bag. He chastises her for being unmarried and for abandoning her mother and Korean name, warning Amanda that her mother’s rage would fester as long as her mother’s ashes are kept in the luggage.
However, when Chrissy, who has been home-schooled, acquires control of her mother, Amanda obtains her worst of getting her mother aura.
Umma moves along quickly, clocking in at 84 minutes. The scares in the film are largely ambient, with stately camera movements moving around areas slowly. Occasionally out of focus apparitions lurk in the background or the corner of the eye, remaining for only a fraction of a second.
Sound effects in the movie:
The film uses sound effects well to accomplish the heavy lifting in set-pieces, despite the lack of blood, guts, and visual effects.
Meanwhile, the influence of Korean horror is palpable—and the film will undoubtedly thrill lovers of the subgenre—but many of Shim’s decisions wind up portraying the confluence of Asian and Asian-American culture in a fairly unflattering light.
Umma delves at the tangle of parent-child roles that have been embroiled in new social and political circumstances. It illustrates the increasingly incompatible concepts of love and respect that have been passed down through generations of displaced immigrants. For a horror movie, these are not uninteresting concepts.
Amanda’s greatest concern is that she would not only have become her mother by replaying the same cruelty on her daughter but that the experiment of relocating for a better, presumably different way of life would have failed if the same motherly blunders are committed.
Either you—the first, second, third, or whatever generation of immigrant—failed, or the land itself failed by trapping its residents between integration and ostracization. The land, on the other hand, can fail, but not a mom.
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