The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
If saying that absolutely nothing happens in a movie is considered a spoiler, then I am about to spoil the shit of out Umma. This film broke new ground for me, as it actually showed me something that I’ve never encountered before in the thousands and thousands of horror films that I’ve watched: Umma is the first horror movie that I’ve ever seen in which nobody even gets hurt, let alone killed. In all of my years of watching horror movies, that’s a first and takes the crown from The Darkness (2016) as the least menacing horror film ever made (at least somebody got bit by a dog in The Darkness). This movie has single-handedly lowered the bar for an entire genre and will stick with me as the new standard by which I judge shitty horror films. In fact, I saw X and Umma within two days of each other and the experience of seeing Umma raised X by an entire letter grade. Now, whenever I see a terrible horror movie, I’ll have to stop and think of Umma and say “well, at least something happened in it.” Now those are standards.
Umma is the story of Amanda, played by Sandra Oh, who lives on a remote farm with her daughter where they raise bees and sell honey. They live completely off the grid because Amanda is terrified of electricity because her mother used to punish her with electric shocks and has convinced her daughter that she is allergic to electricity (the daughter, a frigging teenager, somehow believes this). One day, the ashes of Amanda’s mother (or “umma’ in Korean, apparently) are delivered by her uncle. The arrival of umma’s ashes triggers visions and nightmares of the abuse that Amanda suffered at the hands of her mother and the ghost of umma rises to possess the young daughter and turn her against Amanda.
This sounds like a potentially compelling ghost story crossed with a Hallmark movie, a multi-generational story of struggles with identity and heritage. It posits interesting questions about the inevitability of becoming one’s parents and the difficulties of communication that arise when different generations of the same family are raised in different cultures (American vs. Korean, in this instance). Does culture trump genetics? Does one have a responsibility to honor the culture of their ancestors? Can a teenager actually be stupid enough to believe that someone can be allergic to electricity? These are all genuine questions asked by Umma and they are worthy of cinematic exploration.
I say all of that to make it clear that the thematic intentions of this film are not lost on me. With that established, the issue is that nothing, NOT A GODDAMN THING, happens in this fucking movie. Aside from a few dream sequences, we do get the daughter becoming possessed by the spirit of the dead mother. Don’t worry, she doesn’t hurt anyone or anything. That would be too aggressive. She just kind of acts like a bitch. The terror does build to a crescendo, though, when Amanda is dragged into the ground to finally confront her mother’s spirit face-to-face. She screams as she’s plunged into the hellish afterlife to…well, have a casual conversation with her mother. The mother doesn’t appear as a rotting corpse or demonic figure or anything, she just looks like herself and chills out in a chair. They hash things out and then, in a big final twist…..GET READY FOR THIS…..they get over their differences and that’s it. Just thinking about it gives me the chills, let me tell you. If you are faint of heart, don’t even attempt to sit through the sheer terror of the casual conversations on display here. You have been warned.
Umma is a horror film for people that hate horror films. If you know someone that is scared of their own shadow, someone that shits their pants when they walk into a Spirit of Halloween store, someone that is still having nightmares from that one Fear Street book that they read in middle school, then this is the horror movie for them. I promise you that they will sleep like a baby with a drinking problem after sitting through the pure, unbridled terror of Umma. On the plus side, it has set a record for lowest body count and fewest scares in a horror film and it’s a record that can be tied, but never broken.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umma_(2022_film)#/media/File:Umma_(2022_film).jpg
