Umma Ending Explained: Does Amanda Survive? Does Umma’s Spirit Really Gone?

Umma, the 2022 film directed and written by Iris K. Shim, is available on Netflix from December 20, 2023. The leading actresses in the film are Sandra Oh and Fivel Stewart, who play Amanda and Christie respectively. The film tells the story of Amanda, a single mother who lives with her daughter on an isolated farm. Suddenly the woman is haunted by the ghost of her mother, who wants to force her to give her a traditional burial so that her soul can rest in peace. Shim’s directorial debut film to its catalog, which sees actress Sandra Oh in the role of Amanda, a Korean immigrant, and beekeeper who lives with her teenage daughter Chrissy (Fivel Stewart) on a farm isolated from the world. Not only that: the woman seems to be suffering from a strange allergy to electricity, a condition that has led her to abolish any type of electrical equipment from the estate, including light bulbs.

Despite everything, mother and daughter lead a peaceful life, which is disturbed by the arrival of Amanda’s uncle and the ashes of the protagonist’s deceased mother – Umma in Korean. Still traumatized by the corporal punishment (to be precise, electric shocks) inflicted by the elderly woman when she was just a child, Amanda refuses to grant a dignified burial to the remains of her mother. Umma‘s spirit thus begins to haunt the family with disturbing apparitions. If you have reached the end of watching the film, you will already know that, as we move towards the epilogue of the film, Umma‘s spirit takes possession of Amanda’s body, to try to straighten out Chrissy who harbors the desire to go to college and therefore abandon the farm and, consequently, the mother. But what happens in the end? Can Amanda free herself from the ghost of the old woman and, above all, save her life? Let’s find out together in our explanation of the ending of Umma.

Umma Plot Summary

The plot of the film Umma begins with a prologue, through which we can see a young Soo-Yun being tortured by her mother after she tries to escape. The little girl calls the woman Umma, which means mother in Korean. She then arrives in the present, 16 years after those events. Now See-Yun is called Amanda Oh and lives on an isolated farm in America with her teenage daughter Chrissy, whose identity as her father is not revealed. Due to her mother’s abuse, Amanda is paranoid, with her mother’s traumas haunting her. For example, he does not keep electronic devices at home, after convincing his daughter that she is allergic to electricity. The two spend their days beekeeping. Amanda sells jars of honey to a local merchant, Danny, among other foods that she grows on her farm.

Danny respects the woman’s way of life but believes that Chrissy should leave that place and enroll in college to discover the outside world. Living alone on that farm is making the girl suffocate, and she wants to leave. Through Danny, he gets an application form for West Mesa University and tries to talk to his mom about it. Meanwhile, Amanda’s uncle Kang arrives and lets her know that her mother died of a heart attack while she was calling his name. Now her mother’s spirit will remain trapped in the human world, as she was too disappointed in her daughter. Kang leaves Amanda the box with her mother’s ashes, warning her that she should have a proper burial. Amanda, however, decides to lock her in her basement, avoiding dealing with her problems. So, her mother’s evil spirit begins to haunt her and her daughter Chrissy.

Umma Ending Explained: Was Amanda Really Allergic to Electricity?

As can already be easily understood from the numerous flashbacks to Amanda’s childhood, the woman is not allergic to electricity but has a visceral fear of it due to the trauma she has suffered. When Umma possesses her, she tells Chrissy how in the past she punished her daughter by forcing her to hold the broken cable of an old lamp in her hands, from which shocks of electricity came out. A punishment inflicted on the young Amanda every time she tried to escape from a deeply unhappy mother who wanted to make her daughter suffer the same suffering.

How Does Umma End?

After this confession, which makes the viewer understand the origin of Amanda’s traumas, Chrissy runs away to the farm garden where she sees a nine-tailed fox (kumiho) – a legendary animal of Korean culture with an evil meaning – eating a chicken. She is then joined by Umma (or rather, by her mother possessed by her spirit) but, after a brief scuffle, Chrissy manages to awaken her mother, making her remember memories of a happy past together. The idyll, however, does not last long: Umma‘s ghost drags Amanda into the grave dug for her burial, and the woman finds herself in what had been her childhood home in Korea. Here, sitting on a chair, is Umma, who accuses her daughter of having always thought only of her happiness and of never having returned to visit her again. Amanda shows, without the slightest hint of anger, that she explains to her mother that she has understood her pain, that she has understood how the fact of having had to give up her life in the past to follow her husband to a foreign land has made me profoundly unhappy. At the end of the film, the words that Amanda says to the old woman are:

I understand that life has been cruel to you. But you were with me. I had to leave and now you have to do the same.

Does Amanda Survive?

Amanda then opens the door of the room she is in, forever leaving behind her painful past and her mother, to whom she promises to grant a dignified burial so that she can find at least in death peace he never had in life. After this final farewell, we return to the real and present dimension, and we see the woman struggling to emerge from under the ground where she had been dragged. Amanda is alive and finally free of the weight of her traumas.

Is Chrissy Going to College?

The next morning, as mother and daughter Jesa for Umma‘s eternal rest, Chrissy receives a text; We thus understand that Amanda has also overcome her phobia of electricity and now allows the use of equipment on the farm. The one who sent the message to the girl was Danny, a local trader who helps the two women in their online honey business: the man came to pick her up in her pick-up to take her to college. Amanda has finally understood that allowing her daughter to follow her path does not mean losing her, on the contrary, it means forming an even more solid and lasting bond with her.

Does Umma‘s Spirit Really Gone?

As Chrissy and Danny drive away in the man’s pickup, the shot shifts to Umma‘s grave. Here we see a figure from behind wearing a long traditional Korean dress. We can assume that it is the spirit of the old woman who, contrary to what was previously assumed, did not find peace in the burial. But it could also be Amanda herself, in reality still possessed by the spirit of her mother who remained in the world of the living to study her next move.