I watched this movie on Netflix. I don't think it would be particularly traumatizing to anyone, but it might be interesting.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/umma-movie-review-2022I agree with the review. I'll add that Sandra Oh (Amanda on the film) is a pretty good actress. Amanda lives with her daughter Chrissy on a remote farm raising bees and harvesting and selling honey. They live without electricity.
Though there is a cultural aspect here (Korean), I didn't really pick up on the enmeshment aspect, or perhaps "emotional incest" between Amanda and her mother, "Umma," the now vengeful spirit who demands loyalty and servitude from beyond the grave, until halfway through. Umma is a vengeful ghost because she wasn't properly laid to rest with respect by her daughter Amanda. Amanda fled years ago because her mother was physically and emotionally abusive. Vengeful ghosts are more of an Eastern motif. She is shamed by her uncle who brings Umma's remains from Korea.
The comparison and contrast is between Amanda and her mother, whose abuses are more hinted at, and Amanda and her college aged daughter Chrissy. The conflict there is if Amanda is going to let her daughter go out into the world as a free, independent person, or of she'll have to escape as Amanda did and cut off all ties in order to survive. Umma, the vengeful ghost steps in to control that as Amanda is failing. I didn't really pick up on the emotional incest and enmeshment angles until about halfway through the movie.
The penultimate scene between Amanda and her ghost mother, who subsumes Amanda into the [mother] earth and the spirit world, as perhaps what similarly abused children want to really say: that Umma's pain (though explained, and sympathetic) wasn't an excuse to inflict that pain upon her child. Umma flat out admits it that she wanted her daughter to feel her pain. This is the motivation of abusers: they project their pain upon others in order to cope. That it hurts people is irrelevant, yet Amanda gets the chance to tell her ghost mother.
Amanda's "allergy" to electricity was also explained, heretofore an odd affectation, yet totally taken at face value and believed by Chrissy even when questioned by her new friend. I won't spoil that scene.
Though eccentric on their remote bee keeping farm with no electricity, what Chrissy told her new friend was interesting: "my mom is my friend," having had no other real friends being home schooled and isolated on the farm. Chrissy didn't know what was abnormal because she didn't know what she didn't know.
Her friend early on pointed out that it was weird that she was writing her college application on a typewriter. "I didn't know you could do that." Amanda was unintentionally doing to her daughter what her mother did to her, even if not obviously abusive: enlisting her child as an ally and emotional crutch in order to cope with her pain.
Though straight up horror for near the last twenty minute (nothing too bad), everyone made peace in the end.
I likely won't watch it again, but it certainly provided much for for thought.
