Tag: horror movie review

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: Umma (2022) Review: When Motherhood Turns Into Horror

by horrorfeminista1 Comment on 31 Days of Horror: Umma (2022) Review: When Motherhood Turns Into Horror

I was on a JetBlue flight to California for my pick yesterday (October 6), and my choices were severely limited. You would think with the month being October, they would have come up with some Halloween-themed programming. That was not the case. After some mad texting with my sister before takeoff, we settled on Umma since neither of us had seen it. Umma was a very short movie with Sandra Oh as the lead, who I love, and I was initially excited because the JetBlue notes said Sam Raimi directed the film. How odd, I thought. That’s something that ought to have been on my radar, a new Sam Raimi horror movie. But lies! He did not direct the movie—JetBlue must not use a fact checker for their programming notes. Instead, he produced it, which I found out later when I had proper Internet access. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQdXvvtu-iI

Somehow, sandwiched between five kids to the front and back of me, I started my movie about thirty minutes into the flight. And I was underwhelmed.

The adjectives I would apply to this movie overall are pale and thin. It’s a bit of a nothing story with Oh playing overprotective mother Amanda, who is a beekeeper making her money selling honey and doing quite well after a social media post goes viral. She has plans to expand the business with her daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart) to keep up with skyrocketing demand for the product, but Chris has other ideas for her future.

Amanda has a peculiar illness where she’s allergic to electricity, most likely stemming from abuse as there are several flashbacks with imagery of hands being electrocuted. That results in Chris and Amanda living in an old farmhouse lit by kerosene lamps, which gives the movie a beautiful, old-timey aesthetic. I’m not sure how they tend to all the other beekeeping and honey-making duties without electricity, but somehow, we’re led to believe that they get it done. Amanda does get help from her accountant and business partner Danny (Dermot Mulroney) who shoulders a good part of the work. He has a niece visiting him for the summer, River (Odeya Rush), who helps to show Chris what a normal young woman’s life looks like. Chris is socially awkward after being homeschooled by Amanda and has absorbed her fear of the outside world.

There are glimmers of real promise in Umma—some of the acting between Oh and Stewart are magical and crackled off my tiny JetBlue screen. I also appreciated the theme of filial piety and nods to Korean mythology. I got just a taste and wished there had been so much more. There just wasn’t enough story, I thought, for the whole movie to hang together. Iris K. Shim wrote and directed this film, and looking up her previous work, I’ve added her documentary The House of Suh to my list of movies to watch. I do hope she will write and direct another horror movie. She’s working with some wonderful elements, but I don’t think the big picture has been fully realized yet.

The rest of my weekend, I was fully immersed in my astrology retreat and didn’t watch any other horror movies, though I collected a lot of ideas. There was a huge contingent of horror movie fans at the event, and I’ve got a huge list of films and series on my To Be Watched list: Martyrs (2008), The Ritual, Kill List, The Dark and the Wicked, The Servant, and Trollhunter. Just when I think I’m well-versed in horror, I realize how much I still have to learn. So it looks like my 31 Days of Horror series will have to extend into November, but with the amount of titles I’m adding to my TBW list, I might have to turn this project into something larger. Maybe there’s 365 Days of Horror in me.

Horror, Movies

31 Days of Horror: The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015): A Cold, Quiet Horror of Isolation and Possession

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Today was my choice for our daily horror movie, and I went for The Blackcoat’s Daughter, which was available to watch on Showtime. My reasons: It has Kiernan Shipka in it, who I love, and takes place in a Catholic boarding school. I’ve always been attracted to those boarding school settings that are perfect for witchcraft and covens. If I see a plaid skirt, I’m in. It’s been a dreary day in New York with lots of rain coming down from the remnants of Hurricane Ian. So with a Chinese food order on the way and my legs tucked under a leopard blanket, we started the movie.

At an upstate New York Catholic boarding school called Bramford Academy, two girls are left during the start of winter break: Kat (Kiernan Shipka), a freshman who seems disconnected from most of her classmates and staff, and Rose (Lucy Boynton), an upperclassman who believes she is pregnant and has lied to her parents about when to pick her up.

Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton).

Kat seems to have a vision about her parents dying in an accident and engages in increasingly odd behavior as the girls rattle around alone in the academy with only two older nuns to watch over them. At night, Rose hears moaning coming up through the heater vents, and when she goes down to the boiler room, she finds Kat prostrating herself in front of the furnace.

Left alone long enough, something changes.

This sequence comes to an end with some disturbing contortions from Kat while sleeping, the kind I associate with demon possession. And then we cut to a new storyline where the subject switches to a third girl named Joan (Emma Roberts) who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and is trying to put some distance between herself and it. There’s no indication whether this storyline is happening simultaneously with Kat and Rose’s or precedes or comes after it.

She’s picked up by a man named Bill and his wife in a creepy scene where I kept waiting for some sort of sexual overture to happen. Instead, Bill (James Remar) pays for Joan’s hotel room while they are on the road heading to a town that’s just past Bramford. And while visiting with her in her hotel room to get her story, he tells Joan that he believes God put her in his path. This all happens while Joan sits in a towel with a prominent puckered scar on her shoulder that matches another on her chest. Later, he shows her a picture of his daughter Rose, who’s now deceased.

The absence leaves room for something to take hold.

There’s some more back and forth between the characters’ storylines, and the audience now knows that Kat and Rose’s story comes first. In the second section featuring Kat and Rose, Kat continues to be creepy. She tells Rose twice, “You smell pretty.” We see Kat’s calendar marked with winter break and then there’s a big heart drawn over February 14 earlier in the month. An alternate title for the movie is actually February, what I think of as the bleakest month in some parts of the United States. But the heart makes me think that maybe Kat was trying to flirt with Rose? I don’t know—there’s not much to work with here.

Through Kat’s perspective, the audience sees a black-horned shape that haunts her in nearly every scene. When she tries to call her family, she gets a disembodied voice telling her to kill everyone. The nuns, Rose, and Kat sit down for lunch, and Kat has a breakdown that ends in a murderous rampage. She turns up Ed Kemper–style in front of the furnace in the basement boiler room and is shot by a frightened cop.

A horror that settles rather than strikes.

After this, we’re back to Joan’s storyline, and going by the prominent bullet scar on her body, I’m guessing she’s supposed to be Kat. I’m not sure if the Joan section makes much sense to me. I can see similarities in the hair, but the two actresses appear to be around the same age so the difference in the timeline doesn’t gel for me. But I understand the impulse to try and tie the story up neatly. A lot of this movie left me cold, and I don’t think it was just the rainy day. I liked the puzzling little details that seemed to fit together neatly by the end of the movie, but I couldn’t really find much heart pumping the story along. This was the first feature film by director Oz Perkins, who comes from quite a horror pedigree as he’s the son of Anthony Perkins. He’s also directed I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House and Gretel & Hansel. I quite liked the retelling of Gretel & Hansel; it was so atmospheric and gothic and real feminist horror, I thought. But I haven’t yet seen I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. Maybe I’ll slate it for later in the month, on the days when I’m traveling. I like it that Perkins has chosen to do horror focusing on women’s stories and want to see how he further develops.