*/****
starring Sandra Oh, Fivel Stewart, MeeWha Alana Lee, Dermot Mulroney
written and directed by Iris K. Shim

by Walter Chaw Sandra Oh is very good as a woman working through the generational trauma shared by many first-gen Asian immigrants to the United States. She’s exceptional occupying a range of complex, polarized emotions, managing in many instances to pull off scenes headed towards histrionics with exactly the right amount of reserve to keep it south of camp. Consider when her amateur apiarist Amanda learns of her mother’s death from a long-estranged uncle (Tom Yi), who appears on her doorstep unannounced. He disapproves of how Amanda’s daughter Chris (Fivel Stewart), born and raised in the United States, doesn’t speak a word of Korean, and he blames Amanda for causing her mother’s passing by the fact of her absence sitting vigil at her deathbed. He gives Amanda a bundle comprising her mother’s favourite things along with her ashes, telling her to provide her a proper burial, lest Amanda herself become as vicious and intolerable as her Umma (MeeWha Alana Lee). Oh keeps her emotions steady. She holds on to them like a drowning sailor. You can see the turmoil in her face, though it’s carefully held, and when she tells him to leave, she does it without turning the table over. That’s powerful stuff. There’s an entire film here, a good one, that never goes to a supernatural place with Amanda’s baggage–one that recognizes how strong Oh’s internalization of this role is and lets her do it without things jumping out at her from the basement. The parts of Umma that explicitly fail are the horror-movie parts. It’s not simply that they don’t work, it’s that making an Asian mother the literal monster in an American horror movie is absolutely fraught with representational landmines writer-director Iris K. Shim doesn’t quite know how to avoid. Had a white creator made either this or the recent Turning Red, there’d be an uproar. A justified one.

****/****
starring Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Brittany Snow, Kid Cudi
written and directed by Ti West

by Walter Chaw Early on in Ti West’s X, a guy pulls out a guitar in the rented bungalow he’s sharing with his buddies and starts playing a familiar riff. His girlfriend sings. She has a pretty voice. Not a world-shaking voice, but she means what she’s singing, which makes up for a multitude of sins. It’s a tough scene to pull off due to it being a set-up that’s been paid off a few times, as it was in Animal House, by someone walking by and smashing the guitar against a wall. There are fewer muscles necessary to affect a snarky posture than to strike an earnest pose–less skill required to arch an eyebrow than to build a situation with fully-rounded characters we care about enough not to mock for their desire to connect with one another. How exactly, in 2022, do you do a scene where a group of kids performs “Landslide” without eliciting eye-rolls? Especially in a horror movie where a certain amount of superiority to the material is the expectation rather than the exception? Stevie Nicks wrote “Landslide” in 1974 to talk about a period of separation from her boyfriend and bandmate Lindsey Buckingham. An underestimated, perhaps superb lyricist, Nicks uses a natural disaster as a metaphor for both the violence and the inevitability of change over a lifetime: how she’ll lose her looks to age, how she’ll weather the tribulations of being in love in a temporary world. West shoots this scene without a hint of jokiness, intercutting the young folks at repose with elderly folks–their hosts–dressing for bed. The camera lingers on the sharp valleys and clefts of an old woman’s back, casting harsh shadows in the moonlight. I expected many things from X, but I didn’t expect it to make me cry.