The Sandra Oh ghost story Umma is one giant missed opportunity

polygon.com:

Horror is part of Sam Raimi’s filmmaking DNA, whether he’s going all-out with slapstick gorefests like theEvil Dead trilogy, adding monster-movie touches to his Spider-Man movies, or suffusing thrillers like A Simple Plan or The Gift with a more subdued form of creeping dread. So it’s only natural that he’d spend some of his big-studio capital on producing horror movies — and it’s downright confounding how few of them have been any good. Cracking B-movies like Don’t Breathe and Crawl are the exceptions. The disappointing likes of 30 Days of Night and Boogeyman have been the rule.

Raimi’s faltering track record as a horror producer isn’t the responsibility of Iris K. Shim, the writer-director behindUmma. But watching this resolutely unscary, poorly paced, Raimi-produced horror picture, it’s difficult to avoid a pang of longing for the energy and aggression of films like Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, which he described in promotional interviews as a “spook-a-blast.” The simplest definition of that term is an amped-up funhouse horror movie, which Umma isn’t, apart from one Drag Me to Hell-style shot where the heroine is, yes, dragged off by a ghostly force. Unfortunately, that wildness proves short-lived. Throughout its slim but slow 83 minutes,Umma piles up missed-opportunity scenes that cry out for a ghoulish sense of humor or an audience-rattling jump.

Instead, Amanda (Killing Eve co-star Sandra Oh) spends a lot of time moping. Amanda has escaped her domineering mother in Korea (the movie’s title comes from “mother” in Korean) and relocated to America, where she and her teenage daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart) make honey at a remote little bee farm. Their only regular point of contact is a friendly local (Dermot Mulroney) who