It’s a timeless moderately aged uneasiness: “I feel like I’m transforming into my mom.” And it’s given a most exacting delivering in Iris K. Shim’s powerful repulsiveness work out “Umma,” in which Sandra Oh stars as a country beekeeper possessed by the vindictive soul of her alienated mother. In any case, while that reason could seem like the makings of a joking body-trade dismay fest, “Umma” has far heavier issues on its plate, which demonstrates the two its central prudence and its definitive fixing, as it never figures out how to string the needle between its shock setpieces and the more genuine subjects of generational injury lying underneath.
Set in an anonymous stretch of American farmland, “Umma” opens on Amanda (Oh), a creative original Korean American who has figured out how to develop a steady life offering natural honey to a committed online fanbase of forces to be reckoned with. Not that she knows what the expressions “force to be reckoned with” or “on the web” even mean: attributable to a claimed sensitivity to power, Amanda resides altogether off the lattice, utilizing simple apparatus and candles around the house, and authorizing a severe prohibition on cellphones and contraptions on her property. A tough nearby retailer (Dermot Mulroney) comes by once every week to gather and sell Amanda’s most recent honey take, yet other than that, she and her self-taught young girl Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) are essentially cut off from the external world.The underlying driver of Amanda’s repugnances isn’t difficult to figure, as the film starts with the first of a few flashbacks to her terrible youth with an oppressive mother, who used to direct electric shocks as discipline for “defiance.” Amanda’s horrendous past is totally obscure to Chrissy, nonetheless, and she has started to long for a daily existence outside the nineteenth century-style limits of her mom’s warm yet flighty hug, covertly applying to school and initiating a relationship with a meeting city young lady (Odeya Rush).
Inconvenience shows up as Amanda’s uncle (Tom Yi), who ventures as far as possible from Korea to convey the news that her mom has kicked the bucket. After harshly addressing Amanda for cutting binds with her mom and neglecting to show her girl Korean, he conveys a bag containing her mom’s cremains and belongings, which she quickly stows away in the storm cellar close by boxes of disposed of lights and electrical wires. It isn’t some time before Amanda’s flashbacks and bad dreams strengthen, and the presence of her umma (“mama”) starts to spread the word, both through creepy nighttime specters and Amanda’s undeniably unforgiving way to deal with childrearing.
