Umma is one of those highly conscientious, very well meaning and sincere movies that ramps up dramatics so much, it tends to forget it’s meant to be scary. It’s a slow-simmering pot set on so low that it doesn’t seem to ever come to a boil.
Which is to say that while conceptually interesting and well-acted, the movie never really wows or excites or even scares. What went wrong with this tale of motherly love at its creepiest? Well, let’s see… The idea goes like this. A Korean-American woman (very decent Sandra Oh) lives remotely and very, very off-the-grid with her teenage daughter (adorable, peculiarly named Fivel Stewart of Atypical fame). A woman used to once be an accountant, but then developed a paralyzing fear of electricity and turned to bees. Now they got a booming apiary that hunky local shop owner played by Dermot Mulroney is helping her sell. Decent enough of a life all around, albeit much too limiting and limited for the daughter. But then again, daughters pay for the peculiarities of their mothers. That seems to be the theme here. Then a Korean uncle shows up telling Oh’s character than her mother died and leaving her with a creepy suitcase. And that just seems to open up a really nasty can of doodoo. Turns out Umma (Korean for mother) was a bitter mean witch (used allegorically and for rhyming purposes) who never learned to feel at home in her adopted country after immigrating from Korea and took her unhappiness out on her daughter. And apparently afterlife isn’t much homier, so she’s determined to haunt her daughter from the grave. Then the movie remembers it’s supposed to be scary…Enter some ghostly and possession elements. The moral (rather obvious and heavy handed) is that all women eventually turn into their mothers if they are not careful and drag their own ugly business out generationally. It may be accurate, but it isn’t enough and certainly not enough to sustain this movie, which manages to feel slow at just 83 minutes. Objectively, it would have probably been fine as a short, 20 or 25 minutes. It would have probably been fine as just a drama. But the first-time writer/director Shim obviously overreached here, trying for a sort of serious cinema with cheap jump scares, and it just didn’t quite work. Even with a producer as genre legendary as Raimi. Not very exciting and slow, but it'll work wonders if you can't fall asleep.
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