South Korean film “The Ugly” is willing to explorer the very, very, very ugly sides of the South Korean society during the 1970s, and I appreciate that to some degree even though I am not that sure about whether it works as well as intended. No, I do not mind at all what it is about, but I often could not help but get quite distracted by how it is about, and the overall result is a merely miserable and depressing experience without enough reasons to justify that.
The movie, which incidentally consists of several chapters and a sort of epilogue, begins with a TV documentary interview on a visually impaired old man named Lim Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo). For many years, Yeong-gyu has been recognized as a peerless master of seal engraving in South Korea despite his visual impairment. Along with his adult son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min), we see him interviewed by a young female documentary director and a few crew members of hers, and the director is certainly eager to get any interesting life story from Yeong-gyu.
Not long after the latest interview session is over, there suddenly comes something quite interesting for the director. The local police call Dong-hwan, and he is notified that the remains of his vanished mother, Young-hee (Shin Hyun-been) was recently discovered somewhere near where his father began his craft in the 1970s. Because his mother was gone around the time when he was just a little baby boy, Dong-hwan does not feel that bad about this news, but he and his father soon come to preside over her following funeral anyway, and the director also attends the funeral out of curiosity.
To Dong-hwan’s little surprise, several family members of Young-hee unexpectedly come just for a little matter on their family assets, and that is when Dong-hwan and the director become more interested in who Young-hee actually was. While being rather reluctant at first, her family members tell them a bit about how Young-hee came to leave her family many years ago – and how ugly her face also was.
Because he knew that his mother worked at some shabby garment factory around the time when she met and married his father, Dong-hwan and the director later approach to the three old people who knew Young-hee and her husband during that time, and they willingly tell them about how things were quite bad and miserable for Young-hee. For instance, she was often ridiculed for her ugly face as well as her rather dim attitude, and there is a painful (and disgusting) flashback scene showing another bad day at her workplace.
The movie did a fairly good job of showing the dark underbelly of the South Korean society during the 1970s, which is incidentally not so far from what is observed from those seedy industrial areas of many developing countries at present. In the name of more advance and development for their country and society, millions of meek laborers like Young-hee were frequently exploited for their physical labor while not often being paid enough for their shabby lives, and this deplorable unfairness during that grim period is mainly represented by their sleazy boss, who was also hiding more unpleasant sides behind his ebullient appearance.
However, the screenplay by director/writer Yeon Sang-ho, which is based on his graphic novel of the same name, fails to develop Young-hee into someone more than an elusive MacGuffin figure. Although Shin Hyun-been does try hard for conveying to us her character’s human qualities, the screenplay unfortunately falters in terms of characterization while simply throwing one moment of abuse after another upon Young-hee along the story, and we just get more disgusted again and again.
To make matters worse, the film adamantly restrains itself from showing Young-hee’s face just for inducing more curiosity and then guilt from us, and this blatant storytelling gimmick is quite distracting for us at times. It may work better in Yeon’s graphic novel (I have not read it, by the way), but this makes us all the more distant to the story and characters instead, and I must tell you that what is eventually (and expectedly) revealed during its second half is pretty anti-climactic to say the least.
Several other main cast members in the film besides Shin are also seriously wasted on the whole. Park Jeong-min, who has been one of the most interesting performers in South Korean cinema since his breakthrough supporting turn in “Bleak Night” (2011), surely has a lot of stuffs to play because he also has to play young Yeong-gyu in the flashback part of the film, but this is not exactly one of his best performances in my trivial opinion. In case of Kwon Hae-hyo, Im Seong-jae, and Han Ji-hyun, they are mostly stuck with their thankless supporting parts, and Han is particularly limited by her thin supporting role more than once.
In conclusion, “The Ugly”, which was recently shown in the Toronto International Film Festival, is disappointing for being superficially grim and stark without enough substance to hold our attention. As shown from his several truly disturbing animations films including “The King of Pigs” (2011) and his recent Netflix film “Revelations” (2025), Yeon is no stranger to something really dark and disturbing, but he can do much better than this monotonously seedy and unpleasant work, and I must confess that my mind is already to wash it away as soon as possible.
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