How the director of Umma made one mother of a horror movie

In the just-released supernatural horror movie Umma, Sandra Oh plays Amanda, who operates a remote honey-making farm with the help of her daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart) and family friend Danny (Dermot Mulroney). Amanda's idyllic life is terrifyingly disturbed when she receives the remains of her recently-deceased mother (MeeWha Alana Lee), a Korean immigrant whose less-than-kindly clutches Amanda had thought she escaped years before.

"Amanda becomes haunted by the ghost of her mother and by the fears of turning into her mother," says writer-director Iris K. Shim.

Shim had written the role of Amanda with Sandra Oh in mind but thought it unlikely the Killing Eve actress would sign on to the project.

"I had never seen her in a movie like this," says the director. "But she was very much interested in the core of the story, not only the Korean-American identity, but exploring the mother relationship. As soon as she understood that element of the story, she was excited about the film."

Umma is Shim's directorial debut and is produced by Spider-Man and Evil Dead filmmaker Sam Raimi.

"His producing partner, Zainab Azizi, got the script first," says Shim. "She really connected to the script on a personal level, and she brought it to Sam. He was very much involved in the development process, and obviously he's such a horror icon, and so he did give a lot of good ideas and suggestions about the horror elements of it."

Shim grew up in Chicago without much encouragement to become a filmmaker.

"My parents were fairly traditional immigrant parents, the arts in general weren't something that they were pushing, they were just hoping that their kids would have a stable life with a stable career," she says. "A lot of my friends, they weren't that interested in movies, so I didn't really have a group of friends running around making 8mm short films. The only faces I saw onscreen that looked like me, those movies were coming from Asia, so it was a little bit difficult to see myself actually being allowed to do this. But it was always something I gravitated towards."

After studying psychology at college Shim directed the 2010 true crime documentary The House of Suh, about siblings accused of being responsible for a murder in suburban Chicago. Determined to pursue a career in narrative movies, Shim studied film at Columbia in New York and then headed to LA, where she got a job as assistant to director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale), who was making the 2017 Jackie Chan-starring action-thriller The Foreigner.

"That was something that I could brag to my parents about," she says. "Hey, look, a Jackie Chan movie! They were very excited about that."

Shim was set to start shooting Umma (the Korean word for "mother") in early 2020. You can probably guess what happened next.

"We were actually prepping in Vancouver in January, 2020, and then got shut down with COVID," says Shim. "In the fall of 2020, we decided to shoot in LA instead. This was before vaccines, so everyone was still very nervous being around a lot of people, but everyone was just excited to be back and being creative again. Despite the fact that we were shooting in COVID, there was a really lovely energy on set."

Shim is keen to confirm that the director's relationship with her real-life mother is much less tortured than the one depicted in the film between Amanda and her mom.

"That is true," she says with a laugh. "Sometimes I feel bad that I made this movie!"

Watch the trailer for Umma below.

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