Umma Review

The 2010s saw the rise of elevated horror movies. These are horror films that have dramatic elements or a wider theme and have often been well-received by critics. Iris K. Shim has gone to this subgenre for her feature debut, Umma.

Amanda (Sandra Oh) is a Korean American woman who lives on a farm with her teenage daughter, Chris (Fivel Stewart). They live without electricity or technology like phones and cars and have a successful honey business. However, their world gets rocked when Amanda’s uncle arrives with her mother’s ashes and tells her that she needs to lay her to rest or suffer the consequence. The spirit of Amanda’s mother haunts the pair and drives a wedge between the mother and daughter.

Umma had lofty ambitions regarding its themes of mother-daughter relationships, child abuse, and immigration. It ticks a lot of boxes for an elevated horror film because of these ideas and the quality of the cast.

Shim did take the right steps for a debut feature. She made a deliberately small-scale film with its characters and setting. There were two main characters, only six characters overall and most of the film takes place on the farm. It was a restrictive film and Shim does her best to use them.

Umma had some similarities to the Australian horror film The Babadook. The Babadook was about a struggling single mother and her son who get haunted by a spirit that corrupted the pair of them. In Umma’s case, Amanda and Chris were financially secure and they had a healthy relationship. Their relationship gets corrupted by the spirit of Amanda’s mother. The spirit enhances tensions between the pair, and Amanda gets infected, destroying her caring character.

There was also a little bit of the Shudder original The Power. In that film the main character had a fear of the dark because of childhood trauma. Amanda had a similar experience because her mother electrocuted her, which explains why she refuses to have any electric devices on her property, and she was a nervous wreck during a lightning storm.

Shim does try to pack in a lot of ideas. The most obvious was the mother-daughter relationship. Amanda didn’t want her daughter to suffer the same abuse she did, but Amanda was overprotective with Chris. Amanda’s fear was she would turn into the mother and Umma takes that idea literally.

The other theme in Umma was culture. Amanda has rejected her Korean upbringing and culture. She didn’t even use her Korean birth name. Amanda’s death forced the Korean culture back on her. Chris was unaware of her Korean background, and she acted as an audience stand-in when Amanda explains Korean folklore and funeral practices. The mother-daughter and the cultural issues had the same conclusion, Amanda needing to find a middle ground.

Whilst Umma wants to match recent horror films for themes and ideas, it faulters as a horror film. Many elevated horror films have a lot of atmosphere and tension, which adds to the audience’s investment in the characters. Umma relied too much on jump scares, which is the horror version of a fart joke. Nor did it help that Amanda and Chris’s issues could have been solved with a good heart-to-heart. Amanda should have said that her mother was abusive and Chris needed to tell Amanda that she wants to go to college.

Umma’s best feature was the cast. Sandra Oh has always proven herself to be a talented actress and she did it again in Umma. She was wonderful as the caring if over-protective mother who had a lot of emotional baggage that she has never processed. Amanda was a character who succumbed to paranoia that was fuelled by the spirit and her own anxieties. She was someone who needed to face her issues and be willing to get some help.

Oh worked well with her on-screen daughter and Danny (Dermot Mulroney), the closest thing to a family friend. Chris was shown to be a nice girl who had a sheltered upbringing, who was surprisingly well adjusted. Yet the spirit of her grandmother awakes a rebellious spark in her. Danny was simply a hard-working store owner who supported the family and worked as an everyman character.

Considering the golden age of horror Umma was a minor offering. However, Umma has enough ideas and themes to give it some weight and Oh’s always a delight to watch.