Becoming your mother, through the inevitability of time and genetics, is a scary prospect for some, but in “Umma,” a woman must contend with being possessed by her mother and, along with that, years of abuse and generational trauma.
In Iris K. Shim’s debut film, Sandra Oh stars as Amanda, a Korean American woman who has escaped all semblance of her past and is raising a precocious daughter on a remote farm. Amanda and Chrissy (Fivel Stewart, “Atypical”) are as tight-knit as a mother and daughter can be; they read together, they work together, they hum together. On the farm, they harvest honey from a handful of bee colonies, which they package themselves and give to their friend Danny (Dermot Mulroney) to sell at his shop.