When the remains of Amanda’s (Sandra Oh) mother (MeeWha Alana Lee) – or Umma in her native language, Korean – are brought to the bee farm Amanda runs with her daughter, Kris (Fivel Stewart), Amanda wants nothing to do with seeing to the burial of her estranged mother.  Discontent with being hidden away in storage, Umma begins to haunt the family from the afterlife to ensure she is not forgotten. 

Written and directed by Iris K Shim, Umma is an 83-minute generational horror film that feels very personal to both Shim and the cast.  In that regard, Umma excels as a horror film with a message, and it is very character focused.  Despite the personal touch that is woven into every scene, the core concepts at the center of the film are universal.  Everyone at some point has feared being inadequate in the eyes of their parents, and on the other side of that same coin, parents, surely, want to be good role models for their children.  These familiar titles are ones which we will carry for a lifetime, and it is only natural that sometimes we have doubts about our abilities and what happens if we fail to meet the mark. 

In the lead, Oh has a difficult job as her arc opens to find her as a woman who would do anything for her child, but that darkens into overbearing behavior.  With such a small cast, Umma cannot afford to have a main character so obtuse that she becomes unlikeable, but Oh delivers a truly genuine performance so even when she leans into some of Amanda’s more distasteful tendencies, she never crosses the line in to being a true horror mom like Piper Laurie in Carrie (1976).  Her actions are not maliciously abusive, and the good intentions shine through her shortcomings. This is a single mother scared of losing her daughter to the world, and scared of letting her daughter down in the same way she dears having let her own mother down and came to resent her. 

Opposite her is her teenaged daughter, Kris.  Stewart, while a little underwritten, gives a solid performance of a young woman struggling to find herself.  The script does not always seem to know how to handle her plot line which is a shame because the mother and daughter pair play well off of each other and there could have been many stronger scenes shared between them if they were working off of a more confident script.  Even the exposition dumps are more enjoyable than similar scenes within the genre due to their chemistry, and the character moments where they learn about each other are some of the strongest of the film. 

It is not just the core pairing that face challenges from other aspects of the production.  The sound mix across the board seems a little off, most notably in the dialogue track which often makes the actor’s voices seem disembodied as if they delivered their lines in a post dub.  It is very distracting and becomes most apparent when Amanda and Kris are not together because the few ancillary characters that are in Umma do not share the same chemistry with the leads as they do with each other which helps make some of their disjointed dialogue more palatable when they are together on the farm. 

Umma, through its flaws, delivers an enjoyable enough film that can scratch the itch for a no-frills thriller.  It handles its scares rather clumsily, however, with many of the creepy happenings in the first act seem largely disconnected from Umma, even insofar as a general poltergeist is concerned, and when she reveals herself, the film relies heavily on cheap jump scare setups without much of a buildup or and fake outs.  The result is a film that has an understanding of atmosphere so the individual moments all seem well enough crafted, but as a singular work Umma leaves much to be desired.  Shim has proven she can coax out strong performances so hopefully with each new title, her work becomes stronger over time.