83 min | PG-13 | March 18, 2022 | Sony Pictures Releasing
Sandra Oh raises bees on an off-grid farm and homeschools her daughter to escape the mother who abused her. Then her mother’s ashes show up in a suitcase on the doorstep. Generational trauma deserves a better horror movie than this one.
Amanda lives off the grid on a remote farm with her teenage daughter Chris. She refuses electricity because her mother once used it to punish her. She has built a life of total control to wall off the woman who hurt her. When her mother’s remains arrive from Korea, the past arrives with them. Iris K. Shim’s film is about the way cruelty passes from mother to daughter and the terror of becoming the parent you fled. The horror is the inheritance, not the ghost.
Sandra Oh plays Amanda with brittle composure that cracks by degrees. She makes the fear of her own dead mother feel physical, a thing that tightens her hands and shortens her breath. Fivel Stewart plays Chris with the quiet resentment of a girl raised inside a cage built from someone else’s trauma. Dermot Mulroney plays Danny, the friendly neighbor who supplies the rare outside voice. MeeWha Alana Lee plays Umma as both the vengeful spirit and the memory of the woman. Oh carries the film alone because the script hands the supporting cast almost nothing to play.
Iris K. Shim writes and directs her first feature with more interest in atmosphere than in scares. She shoots the farm in warm natural light and lets the soundtrack interrupt it with stingers. Those stingers are the problem. Shim builds real dread out of silence and the low hum of the bees, then punctures it with the same loud jump scare on a loop. The traditional Korean dress and the visual language of the haunting are the strongest ideas here, and the film uses them as set dressing instead of letting them breathe.
The material is genuine. Korean American identity, the cost of severing your family, the dread that cruelty runs in the blood. Shim lays all of it on the table and then reaches for the cheapest tools to dramatize it. A horror film about inherited abuse should not feel this cautious. The result honors Sandra Oh’s commitment and squanders almost everything standing around her.