The first major Asian American film—and by that I mean film that dealt explicitly with issues and questions of Asian American identity—was a genre piece, Wayne Wang’s inverted, existential 1982 noir Chan is Missing, a mystery concerning a missing taxi cab driver and the uncertain inquiries of what it meant to be Asian in America in his wake.
That subject of what it means to be Asian in America—with its potential dead-end rhetorical roads, its vine-like search for impossible answers, its dealing with institutional power that has both oppressed and privileged, and the chameleonic usefulness of certain terminology—is a dynamic ground for works of genre experimentation.
There’s clandestine romance (The Half of It), melodrama (The Joy Luck Club), and farce (The Wedding Banquet). But with the possible exception of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the extent of Asian American horror is primarily relegated to the early aughts wave of East Asian horror imports that were remade as American, either basically from scratch (The Ring, One Missed Call) or via clumsy combination (The Grudge).
Well, four decades after Chan is Missing, Umma’s home.
And, in Iris K. Shim’s feature debut, which hits theaters Friday, Amanda (Sandra Oh), mother of 16-year-old Chrissy (Fivel Stewart), has little else other than the home she’s made for herself, her daughter, and their bees. Chalky boxes containing hives are arranged like little battalions, bushes and orange colored dirt leading to a sign prohibiting cars from approaching any closer.
Amanda has effectively escaped the world with her daughter in tow, but at least they have one another. Amanda and Chrissy have a relaxed exchange, the kind where they finish one another’s sentences, they know their rhythms so well. The fact that Chrissy is essentially an outcast, homeschooled and without contact with the outside world, is papered over by their mother-daughter compatibility.
But it is not without its troubles. Amanda is kept in a chokehold by nightmares of her Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee) and the abuse her mother subjected her to. They’re flashes like lightning, little lightbulb filaments briefly burning with white hot intensity. The sound of maternal admonishments echo in the lightless house, reverberating against the creaky wood.
When Amanda’s uncle (Tom Yi) arrives one day to deliver the news of Umma’s death, along with her remains, and shames Amanda for leaving to live her own life, the pain she has battled to suppress begins to consume her life, just as her daughter begins to seek her own freedom. The uncle, as if confirming her anxieties as a bad mother and bad daughter, cuts into her for discarding her Korean name, Soo-Hyun.
Flooded with the sting of open emotional wounds, Amanda declines to both give her Korean immigrant mother a jesa (the proper burial ceremony to prepare loved ones for the afterlife) and let Chrissy apply to university.
Umma explores the maelstrom of parent-child roles that are wedged into new social and political contexts. It reveals the increasingly irreconcilable ideas of love and respect that filter down through generations of immigrants displaced from their home. These are not uninteresting premises for a horror film.
The ultimate, soul-sucking fear for Amanda is that she will have not only become her mother in reenacting the same savagery upon her daughter, but that the experiment of relocation for a better, ostensibly different life will have failed if the same motherly mistakes are being made. It’s either you—the first, second, third, or whatever generation of immigrant—who has failed or, by placing its inhabitants in a bind between assimilation and ostracization, the land itself has. But the land could never fail. Only a mother can.
While Umma features complex gender and racial nuances, it feels too narrow and too comfortable operating within its trauma narrative. It’s difficult not to situate the film within the context of nearly a decade’s worth of overly literal trauma narratives in horror, as if surface metaphor were the primary language with which to explore abject motherhood, intergenerational trauma, and marginalized identity.
Yes, horror has long considered trauma a favorite subject, but it’s most compelling when there’s real expressiveness or invention happening. The constant echoes of Amanda’s mother curdle into a crutch. There are few moments of simplicity in its horror, of Oh looking at herself in the mirror, thinking about how she is or isn’t transforming. It’s revealed that Umma was a respected dressmaker in Korea, but the hanbok she leaves for Amanda seems primarily reduced to a kind of scary movie gadget. There’s not much thorough consideration into how clothes, fabrics, and textiles can also be used to articulate concepts of body, technology, and society beyond a binary of tradition/modernity and inheritance/rejection.
The power of the film’s imagery—from a frowning hahoetal to a nine-tailed kumiho, or the ghost of Umma, which claws at Amanda’s eyes with age—is drained both by an increasingly desaturated palette and a frustrating lack of imagination for how these signifiers are implemented. They pop up, saddled with a booming sound, a not unwelcome trick that starts to lose its impact on its fourth attempt. Umma stays loud while struggling to imbue what it’s saying with more emotional or cinematic intricacy.
The film can feel lean to a fault—well, except, mostly, for Sandra Oh and her dynamic with Fivel Stewart. The fear of familial failure is carved into Oh’s face, each action inscribed as “good parenting” subtly bleeding doubt. It’s when they argue that Umma shines, almost implying that the film would have been better as a straight, more talkative melodrama. They trade their own versions of naivete and sling barbs at one another, lodging them into their marrow, the only way mother and daughter can.
Their fights, few though they are in the film, hint at a more exciting and feverish movie, one that doesn’t need to circumvent hard conversations about what our parents do to us, and how those decisions are informed, if not justified, by circumstance. Scarier than all of Umma’s borderline rote horror tropes is the blinding reality of having one’s daughter ferociously hurl the answer to the question—saddled with the weight of expectation and otherness—of “Who am I?” in one’s face: “You are becoming your mother.”