‘Umma’ Found Sandra Oh Tackling Thriller ‘The Scariest Game: Mothers

The first major Asian-American film – and I mean the one that explicitly addresses issues and questions of Asian-American identity – is a work of the genre, the existentialist, inverted film. 1982 by Wayne Wang Chan is missinga mystery involving a missing taxi driver and uncertain questions about what it means to be Asian in his wake.

It’s a theme about what it means to be Asian in America — with its potentially dead-end rhetorical paths, its vine-like ability to find impossible answers, its dealings with physical power. The regime is both oppressive and privileged, and the chameleon usefulness of certain terms—is a dynamic background for genre experimental works.

There is a secret romance (Half of it), melodrama (The clubs are happy luck), and farce (Wedding). But there can be exceptions A girl walking home alone at nightAsian-American horror levels were largely influenced by the original wave of East Asian horror imports that were remade as American, essentially from scratch (Rings, A missed call) or through a clumsy combination (The Grudge).

Well, four decades later Chan is missing, Ummahouse of.

And, in Iris K. Shim’s feature film debut, which hits theaters Friday, Amanda (Sandra Oh), the mother of 16-year-old Chrissy (Fivel Stewart), has nothing but the house she’s made of. for herself, her daughter, and their bees. Chalk boxes containing honeycombs arranged like battalions, bushes and orange dirt lead to a sign prohibiting cars from approaching.

Amanda has effectively escaped from the world with her daughter, but at least they have each other. Amanda and Chrissy had a relaxed exchange, like when they finished each other’s sentences, they knew their rhythm very well. The fact that Chrissy is essentially an outcast, home-schooled, and exposed to the outside world, is documented by their mother-son compatibility.

But not without its troubles. Amanda is held captive by nightmares about her Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee) and the abuse her mother suffered. They flashed like lightning, small filaments of light bulbs that burned for a short time with intense white heat. Mother’s urging echoed in the lightless house, echoing with the creaking of wood.

When Amanda’s uncle (Tom Yi) arrives one day to announce the news of Umma’s death, along with her remains, and Amanda is ashamed to have left to live her own life, the pain she feels She had to fight to suppress the beginning to destroy her life, as well as hers. girls begin to seek their own freedom. The uncle, as if confirming her anxiety as a bad mother and evil daughter, cut off from her for dropping her Korean name, Soo-Hyun.

Drowning in open emotional wounds, Amanda refuses to leave them both to her Korean immigrant mother. jesa (appropriate burial rites to prepare loved ones for the afterlife) and for Chrissy to apply to college.

Umma explores the background of parent-child roles being introduced into new political and social contexts. It shows how increasingly irreconcilable ideas of love and respect have filtered out through generations of immigrants leaving their homeland. These are not compelling premises for a horror film.

The ultimate, alluring fear for Amanda is that she will not only become her own mother by repeating the same barbaric behavior on her daughter, but that the experiment transforms into a good life. more beautiful, a different appearance will fail if the same mistakes of the mother. being made. It is you – first, second, third generation immigrants, or any generation of immigrants – that have failed or, by placing your residents in a tie between assimilation and ostracism, the existing land. But the land can never fail. Only a mother can.

When Umma With complex gender and racial nuances, it feels too narrow and too comfortable to operate in its trauma story. It’s hard not to set the film against the backdrop of nearly a decade of literally horrifying stories of trauma, as if surface metaphor were the primary language for exploring brutal, traumatic motherhood. between generations and marginalized identities.

Yes, horror has long considered trauma a favorite subject, but it’s most intriguing when there’s real expression or invention happening. The echoes continued as Amanda’s mother curled into a crutch. There are a few moments that are simply horrifying like the scene where Oh looks at herself in the mirror, thinking about whether or not she’s morphing. It is revealed that Umma is a respected dressmaker in Korea, but the hanbok she left for Amanda seems to have mostly been reduced to a kind of scary movie accessory. There hasn’t been much consideration for how clothing, fabrics, and textiles can also be used to articulate concepts of the body, technology, and society that go beyond the binary scope of tradition/ modern and inheritance/rejection.

The power of the film’s visuals — from a scowling hahoetal to a nine-tailed kumiho, or Umma’s ghost, which caresses Amanda’s eyes with age — is consumed by an increasingly saturated color palette and an unpleasant lack of imagination about how these signs are made. They pop, slam shut with an explosive sound, an unwelcome trick that begins to lose its impact on the fourth attempt. Umma still humming while trying to imbue what it is saying with more emotionally complex or cinematic introspection.

The movie can feel apologetic — well, mostly except for Sandra Oh and her dynamic with Fivel Stewart. Fear of failure in the family is evident on Oh’s face, each act of “good parenting” hides many doubts. That’s when they argued that Umma shines, almost implying that the film would have been better off as a straight, more lyrical psychological drama. They trade their own versions of innocence and entangled blunders, putting them in their bones, the only way a mother and daughter can.

Their fights, even if they’re just in the movies, hint at a more intriguing and sensational movie, one that doesn’t need to interrupt heated conversations about what our parents do to each other. us, and how those decisions are informed, if not justified, by the circumstances. Scarier than all UmmaHorror stories by heart are a blinding reality when one’s daughter furiously throws the answer to the question — weighed down by the weight of expectation and difference — of “Who am I?” Who?” in the face of a person: “You are becoming your mother.”