Revenance 4: Umma, or the Ghosts of Past Traumas
Umma is a 2022 horror film about a single Korean-American mother named Amanda (Sandra Oh) and her teenage daughter Chris, who own and operate an apiary farm somewhere in the American West. If you have not seen it, cancel your plans for tonight and settle in for popcorn and abject fear.
It’s also part four of my Revenance miniseries. Like Night Country and Winter’s Bone, Umma’s got to do with how the past doesn’t quite want to stay dead. Like them, it’s thinking through the relationship between psychological disturbance and the supernatural. Unlike them, it figures that undead dead, unpassed past not as the cold, but as electricity.
In the film, Amanda cannot, we learn, be “near electricity.” That’s because she was severely physically abused when she was a young child—tortured, even—by her mother, using electricity. We encounter this backstory through flashbacks.
When the story picks up, Amanda is paid an unwanted and unprefaced visit by her maternal uncle, who leaves her recently-deceased mother’s remains at the bee farm. He refuses to call her by her American name, insisting on calling her by the name her mother gave her in Korean. He then cruelly reproaches her for having been a wicked daughter, for abandoning her mother, for failing to attend to her at the hour of her death. He warns her that, if she doesn’t take proper care of her mother’s remains, her mother will haunt her mercilessly, growing more and more poisonous to Oh as her disembodied pain grows wilder. He refers to the mother as a gwishin, or a ghost that has unfinished business among the living.
A revenant.
If there is another horror film about the traumatic legacy of child abuse that finds a crisper way of rendering the psychic aftereffects of having an abusive parent than this, I’m all ears.
Your mother, who tortured you in your youth, will now torture you from the Beyond.
Modern therapy would say that Amanda has unfinished business with her mother; she has to heal, she has to forgive, maybe; at least that she has to accept and make a kind of peace with her trauma. In this film, it’s not Amanda who’s business is unfinished. It’s the abusive gwishin. It’s not that Amanda can’t let go of her trauma (although that’s true, too), but that her trauma can’t let go of her.
In a terrifying rendering of how contemporary trauma scholars understand “intergenerational trauma,” the gwishin’s first move is to involve Chris, Amanda’s daughter. Chris never met the dead grandmother; she was not tortured by her; she does not even appear to know anything about her mother Amanda’s own trauma history. But the gwishin can get at her nonetheless. At first, it’s not clear whether Chris is really involved, or whether Amanda’s fear for her vulnerability to Umma—the grandmother ghost—is really what we’re seeing. But the effect is the same: Chris begins to get increasingly nervous and worried, too. She says to her mother, “You’re acting kind of weird.”
This plot element very closely evokes what trauma neurobiology believes happens through the maternal line in cases of severe trauma. A woman’s body—which already at birth contains all the ova it will ever have, and, hence, the seed crystals of any child it could possibly bear—experiences trauma. That trauma becomes epigenetically encoded into both the mother’s genetic code and the daughter’s genetic code.[1]
In Umma, that idea of intergenerational trauma gets encoded not into DNA or RNA, but into hauntings. Which is, itself, a very common way to think about trauma, deployed in support groups and by therapists alike.
As the film goes on, the allegorical representation of intergenerational trauma only gets clearer. Amanda begins exhibiting signs of controllingness toward Chrissy, going through things in her room, finding her secret college application material, and interrogating her about it. Chrissy says that Danny—who does provisioning for the two of them—gave it to her, pointing out that Danny is Amanda’s and her own only friend. The scene is extraordinarily painful to watch: a daughter, who has not herself lived through trauma, is clearly being made to bear the brunt of her mother’s own traumatic childhood. She lives in excessive isolation. She cannot have electricity, because her mother cannot tolerate it. At one point, Chrissy tries on lipgloss, and Amanda can’t restrain herself from saying, “What’s on your face?” causing Chris to feel shame and wipe it off.
Umma is calling more of the shots through Amanda than she’s like to admit.
Amanda’s haunting/PTSD become worse: she hears her own childhood voice screaming from inside cabinets. She flashes back on conversations with her mother, in which her mother said, “Even in death, I will be with you.” Soon, Amanda begins seeing her mother standing before her, and then standing in a window of the house. “No matter how much you try to forget me,” her mother’s ghost says, “I couldn’t live without you. And now I can’t truly die without you.” The specter lunges at her, and she pushes back, only to discover she’s actually pushing Chrissy, who has dressed up—somehow—in an old dress of Umma’s. Epi-mother-fucking-genetics.
And now, as an added complication, Chrissy is starting—understandably—to be quite afraid of her own mother. Intergenerational trauma: Chrissy may not know about the abusive electrocutions, but she can sense the damage somehow anyway, and it makes her feel unsafe, insecure, unstable.[2] When Chrissy asks, “What’s in the suitcase?” unwittingly referring to Umma’s remains, Amanda slams her hand down on the table to silence Chrissy’s questioning. Not an action designed to foster a sense of safety, trust, or security.
Curious about her mother’s secretiveness, Chrissy goes at night to explore the secret, locked underground chamber under what appears to be their workshed. She carries only a kerosene lamp. This is the kind of scene that reminds me, now (thank you, Jordan Peele), of that moment when Daniel Kaluuya opens his car door briefly, looks up at the sky and says, “Nope.” But Chrissy doesn’t nope herself. Because she is desperate to understand what is wrong with her mother. We realize what she does not, which is that this is the chamber in which her mother was tortured as a young girl. The suitcase is there. As is Umma’s dress. We’re one lamplit heartbeat here from a reenactment of Psycho, but that’s not the direction the film moves in.
Chrissy tries to open the suitcase, when we hear Amanda’s voice—from somewhere else—say, “disobedient little girl,” and suddenly a spark of electricity flies from a circuit breaker on the wall. Evidently, Umma’s ghost is taking over Amanda’s consciousness, and is also somehow reelectrifying the room. But before that’s totally apparent, Chrissy brings a photograph of Umma up from below, and asks Amanda who she is. Consistent with current intergenerational trauma theory, the younger generations need to have some kind of conscious understanding of the traumas that preceded them, if they are to have a prayer of escaping their worst effects. A daughter whose mother was abused needs to know about the abuse, at least to some degree, and about the abuser. Otherwise, the daughter’s own narrative is incomplete, and she carries the trauma more heavily with herself because of her lack of knowledge. Realizing this, Amanda begins to disclose the truth to Chrissy. “Some Koreans believe that life’s hardships are caused by the tormented spirits of their ancestors. They make offerings to appease their tortured souls.”
When Amanda finally tells Chrissy that Umma is with them, for real, Chrissy calls her a “psycho bitch,” and stalks off. In response to that insult, Amanda starts psychologically abusing Chrissy, telling her she doesn’t know how to make friends, and that she (Amanda) is “the only one who’s going to tell you the truth. And the truth is…you can’t do it.” Damn. She begins savagely taunting Chrissy, mocking her prior attempts to go to school with other kids, mocking her for crying after school. Umma is infiltrating Amanda’s consciousness more and more.
As a last ditch effort to purge herself of her mother’s evil influence, Amanda carries her remains out back and digs a hole. But too late: Umma takes possession of Amanda. In Amanda’s body, Umma tells Chrissy all the ways she tortured Amanda. Talking about the electrical wire she had used on Amanda, she said, “I made her hold it, until my pain became hers, and we could feel it together.” This, again, is a powerful allegorical figuration of how unprocessed trauma gets passed between generations. Here, Umma was in pain, and she converted the energy of her own pain into the energy from the wire, transmitting it to Amanda. Now, through Amanda’s own possessed body, she is making her own pain and Amanda’s into Chrissy’s problem.
“You can never escape,” Umma insists, then briefly transforms into Umma’s dessicated old corpse. This is the part of the movie that initially bugged me. What’s best about this film, I felt, is how it forces us to contend with the dual possibility that Amanda is just crazy and that she’s well and truly possessed by her mother. This scene disambiguates that, and makes clear that Umma is really, really there. It’s not all PTSD. In fact, Amanda’s PTSD may not even be the main event. It appears that Umma well and truly is haunting both Amanda and, now, Chrissy. The movie tilts toward the supernatural, and away from the psychological.
But when Umma chases Chrissy down in a field at night, and wrestles her, Chrissy addresses Umma as “Mommy,” and slowly reminds her of all the ways she cared for Chrissy when Chrissy was young. These memories jog Umma out of Amanda, and enable Amanda to strip off Umma’s gown. Chrissy says, “I had no idea what you went through. I wish I knew.” Knowledge is healing. Knowledge can undo or at least begin to repair intergenerational trauma, as many trauma psychologists aver.
But there’s a surplus in the film that can’t be explained away by trauma psychology. At this moment of healing, suddenly, Amanda is grabbed by unseen forces and dragged under the ground. She says, “Mother, show yourself.” Like her daughter, she is ready to seek clarity. She is ready to see what’s real. She awakens into a dream-ghostworld-past, in which she speaks to her mother. Amanda acknowledges her mother’s own sufferings. “I understand that life was cruel to you.” But she goes on to say, “but you were cruel to me.” Amanda shows compassion for her dead mother’s ghost, but does not let her off the hook for her sadistic torture. And then, “I am done taking on your pain.” With that, Amanda crawls back out of the ground, gasping.
A jesa service is performed for Umma, so that she can leave the world of the living for good. Now, evidently at least a few days later, Amanda has let Chrissy get a smart phone, and has let her go to college. All is right with the world. It was a ghost story after all, and, now that Umma’s soul is at rest, things can get better for all the living, tout court.
Disambiguation. Boo.
Or, at least, that’s how I felt the first time I saw this film. The second time, something else happened. I realized that I was bringing a Western bias to the film. I didn’t want to let go of the psychological angle. Didn’t want to have to admit the ghost as decisively real. But what’s that about? Who’s to say that thinking of intergenerational trauma as a psychological epiphenomenon is more true than thinking of it, well and truly, as a kind of haunting? Who’s to say that’s not precisely what ghosts are—unresolved past agonies, anguishes, and traumas, held by people close to us? Sure, in Western psychology, we construe those “ghosts” as internal to us, as “our own” responsibility. But maybe, just maybe, there’s a middle distance. I mean, really, if theories of intergenerational trauma are right, even down to the biomolecular level, who’s to say that thinking of fucked up strands of DNA or RNA, or messed up gene expression couldn’t profitably be thought of as a ghost?
In the very final shot of the film, we see the bottom of Umma’s dress moving near her final place of interment, as Chrissy drives away to go to college. The ghost, apparently, is still there, with Amanda. But now, it’s mollified, calmed, integrated, healed.
And, interestingly, still decisively part of the world of the living. Because the past doesn’t die.
[1] For a clear and compelling overview of this phenomenon, see Mark Wolynn, It Didn’s Start with You (New York: Penguin, 2017). Wolynn presents fascinating data on female mice who are stressed or traumatized, and whose daughters and even granddaughters exhibit abnormal cortisol levels, abnormal startle responses, and abnormal responses to stress.
[2] Wolynn talks about how children who are unaware of parents’ childhood traumas can nevertheless play them out, or experience them in surprisingly collateral ways. He tells an anecdote of a teenager who, at 19, became fixated on the idea of freezing to death, without consciously knowing his own uncle had died that way at 19. How did he internalize that narrative, without consciously hearing it? The mechanisms are unclear, but the phenomenon is clinically significant.