Umma (2022)

directed by Iris K. Shim

USA

88 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I'd been waiting very patiently for this to come out ever since I heard of it - so patiently, in fact, that I missed when it was put on Netflix. Unfortunately, though, it ended up being the latest in a long string of new 2022 horror films that I've gotten my hopes up for only to be let down.

I want to start off by saying that it's entirely possible that I'm just not in the target audience for this, because I don't have any ties to the experience of having an immigrant parent or to Korean culture in general, which are the two central tenets of the film. I was going to start off by saying that this really doesn't feel like it has anything specifically to do with either of those things, and instead it's just a recycled plot with some Korean culture added in, but on second thought I don't think that's the right mindset to have. One of the most important steps in moving towards truly diverse media is that there has to be a lot of media featuring marginalized people that just kind of sucks, not because it's offensive, but because it's mediocre in every way. I don't think people were excited about To All The Boys I've Loved Before because they wanted to see another young adult-oriented rom-com. They were excited because they wanted to see a Vietnamese-American lead in a subgenre that otherwise is saturated with white people. Not every movie with an underrepresented community featured in it has to be a masterpiece, and believing that they should be ultimately holds back progress on actually diversifying cinema.

With that all out of the way, yeah, this was a disappointment. I'm not sure exactly when I realized that the script was really bad, but after I did, it became all I could focus on. Sandra Oh sticks out like a sore thumb (or some equivalent of that expression with more positive connotations) because she appears to be the only person here capable of delivering such a bland and poorly-written script with any kind of feeling. Even Dermot Mulroney does a pretty woeful job. Oh's character's daughter is the worst of them, constantly moping and giving out patented Difficult Teen™ classics such as calling her mom a "psycho bitch"/"crazy psycho" with as little emotion as possible. I think a lot of the film's problems boil down to what seems to be a fairly inexperienced director, but that's just about the best problem a movie like this could have, because it means that the good parts of it - and there were still some of those - will probably be what gets carried over into the director's next film, rather than the low points.

For such a short and simple film, it also has a surprising amount of plot holes. The biggest issue I had in that respect was trying to figure out what Oh's protagonist's supposed aversion to electricity had to do with anything and why it was even part of the film at all. It's not necessarily the most important thing, but it's kind of the crux of the film in that it is the whole reason why her and her daughter live on an isolated chunk of land in the middle of nowhere with no electricity and only the flimsiest of links to the outside world. It's difficult to articulate just how unimportant the protagonist's electricity thing ends up being; her daughter of course eventually finds out that none of it was true, but the film doesn't even seem to place enough importance in that aspect of the plot to explain why she was living like that in the first place. Given her childhood trauma relating to electricity, it could have been a coping mechanism that she came up with a more medically valid excuse for in order to sound less "crazy psycho", as her daughter calls her. But I was under the impression that she herself had been told she had to stay away from electricity, and genuinely believed it would cause her physical, rather than psychological, harm. Are either of these explanations the case? Was there some other explanation? We never find out, because the movie relies on that plot point and then drops it like a hot potato for seemingly no reason.

Any kind of personal growth or message that we could take away from Umma is also hampered by its refusal to explore much beyond the surface level. The main character's inner journey throughout the film is one of realizing that her consuming fear of turning into her mother is leading her to turn into her mother anyway, and by the end, after she's realized that, she can finally break the cycle of generational trauma and become a better person. But... how? The film doesn't show us the process of casting off that trauma or any of the real depth of that struggle. A few other people have brought up the point that this would have been better off just not trying to be a horror movie at all, and I agree with that specifically because it feels like it relies on actual visual depictions of being grabbed, chased, and haunted to stand in for doing the work of unlearning negative habits and shedding family trauma. Instead of showing us a character growing in ways that are not visible, Umma chooses to show us a character escaping a ghost. There's metaphor and then there's using one thing as a flat, uncreative stand-in to cover up an inability to portray another thing.

I know I'm being really harsh on this, and it's because it was so promising and occasionally showed glimpses of a better movie. It is so frustrating when something has so much opportunity to be good but never quite gets there. Sandra Oh is a knockout in this, as always; any other lead actor and it would have basically been nothing. I am looking forward to seeing if Iris Shim goes further with this concept - Korean-tinged horror coming from America could be interesting. I'm very familiar with Korean horror from Korea, but a side of that incorporating the immigrant experience is relatively unexplored territory.