Movie Review: 'Umma' Underwhelms Despite Sandra Oh

Umma stars Sandra Oh as Amanda, a single mother living off the grid somewhere in the southwest of America with her daughter, Chris (Fivel Stewart). Amanda has a desperate aversion to electricity and refuses to power their home. Amanda goes so far as to advise everyone not to even bring cars or cellphones on to her property. This is related to a childhood trauma in which her mother tortured her physically with the frayed cord of an ornate lamp.

We know this about Amanda, but neither Chris, nor Amanda’s business partner Danny (Dermot Mulroney) are aware of Amanda’s trauma. Amanda has spent her life as an adult getting as far away as possible from the memory of her mother. This becomes impossible however when Amanda’s Uncle tracks Amanda down and informs her that her mother has died. By Korean tradition, it is Amanda’s responsibility to help her mother’s spirit rest through a ritual.

The Uncle leaves Amanda a large suitcase with Amanda’s mother’s remains inside along with several items that mean something to her. The items include a traditional robe, silk scarves, and a creepy funeral mask. When Chris sees the suitcase she’s eager to know what it is. Having encountered the intense and angry Uncle outside the grounds of their home, she has a vague notion of what is happening but she’s naïve to the darker aspects of what this suitcase entails.

Amanda has been plagued by nightmares recently, nightmares that by creep-tastic coincidence date to when her mother actually passed away, some three months ago. Since that time, Amanda has been hearing her mother’s voice and seeing her form outlined in every creepy shadow. Is she genuinely being haunted or is her guilt about not being there when her mother died eating away at her mental health? These are questions that drive what little plot there is in Umma.

Umma, for the uninitiated, is a Korean word for mother. It’s how Amanda referred to her mother when they spoke to each other, before Amanda broke away to create a life of her own, off the grid where her mother’s evil, controlling, domineering presence could not get to her. Now, in death, her mother has found her and is slowly seeping into her psyche in ever more frightening fashion. Moreover, Umma’s obsession with order that drove her to torture Amanda, is also driving Amanda to possibly do the same to Chris.

The idea of a woman desperately not trying to become her mother tends to be a hack joke on a sitcom. Have you ever noticed how many one note sitcoms feature a premise where the mother of a female protagonist is portrayed as a monster that the main character desperately tries to avoid being like? Umma takes that premise and applies it to horror as a thematically rich plot device. Umma never treats this premise like a joke and eventually it takes hold as a resonant theme.

That said, too much of Umma goes by without enough story development. The sound design of Umma does so much of the work to try and make the movie scary and the movie comes off desperate to craft an atmosphere. Instead of allowing the tension to settle in over the course of the story, there is a skittish quality to the making of Umma, as if the filmmakers felt if they didn’t have an attempted scare every couple minutes, they might lose the audience.

This doesn’t work because the story is far too mundane and by the numbers until the villain is fully introduced. The film is also wishy washy about who the villain is supposed to be. Is the villain an actual evil entity from another plain of existence or has Amanda begun to unravel and become dangerous? Umma takes too long to make up its mind where the scares are supposed to come from and by the time the reveal arrives, I know that I wasn’t particularly interested anymore.

It’s not that Umma is bad, it has a good idea and in Sandra Oh, it has an actress who can pull this off. Sadly, there is a lack of commitment to the premise, a seeming hedging of bets before the movie settles on a direction for the evil at the heart of the movie. And even that choice of what to commit to is fraught with some bad choices that undermine the deeper themes at play in the mother daughter stories.

Umma is in theaters nationwide as of March 18th, 2022.