Most great cinema centers around The Other — people who, fairly or unfairly, feel out of step with the society around them. Their idiosyncrasies allow filmmakers like, say, Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) to showcase their own filmic idiosyncrasies. Using the overarching template of dark fairy tales, del Toro has consistently contrasted and complicated the melodramatic dialectic between humanity and monstrosity to maximum emotional effect: the loudness of his style may come at the cost of dramatic nuance, but it makes up for it in its unabashed commitment to celebrating the fleshy, pointy, and scaly oddities of his monsters. His cinema spotlights their humanity not by hiding their bodily features that others perceive as grotesque, but by actively highlighting them: his celebration of the grotesque becomes his critique of “normal” human monstrosity. Subtler filmmakers — for instance, Claire Denis — treat the (racial or gendered) Other obliquely. The Other is an enigma here, a mystery that can’t really be solved because, well, a person is not a plot detail that needs solving. Reflection and refraction on the evasive connection between the insider and the outsider become the focus instead: socially accepted definitions of Otherness are not so much outright questioned; they’re quietly dismantled.
The problem with Yeon Sang-ho’s The Ugly (2025) is that it’s neither buoyantly loud nor subtly introspective; it’s a drably middle-of-the-road, almost troublingly superficial critique of a vindictively superficial South Korean society. Sang-ho, who adapted the film from his own 2018 graphic novel of the same name, structures his story as an investigative thriller whereby Lim Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min), the son of a famous visually impaired seal graver, Lim Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo), tries to uncover the truth behind his mother’s death after discovering her skeletal remains four decades after she supposedly went missing. We get five interviews with a smorgasbord of family members, employees, and employers who all — mostly callously and cruelly — remember Dong-hwan’s mother, Jung Young-hee, for her “ugly” facial features, with the employees, most dehumanizingly, nicknaming her “Dung Ogre.” These sequences are all strictly observational, repeatedly highlighting the sickeningly narrow-minded conception of beauty that pervades both traditional and contemporary South Korean society.
But apart from the fifth interview — which really ought to have been the entire movie because it actually dares to probe the poisonously parasitic relationship between two people Othered by South Korean society — the rest of The Ugly offers absolutely nothing else. The sheer repetitiveness of every interviewee casually or self-knowingly demeaning Dong-hwan’s mother for her appearance might have been acceptable had Sang-ho just stuck to showing us these people telling us about the past. But Sang-ho then proceeds to also show us the past in which, lo and behold, these horrible people do the exact same and worse — to Dong-hwan’s mother. Nothing about the recreations is different from what is already told to us, making everything we see entirely redundant.
The biggest — and arguably most troubling — issue of The Ugly, however, is that despite showing and telling us the same thing again and again and again and again, the film, very consciously, never shows us the one thing that everyone consistently talks about: Jung’s “real” face. The past section features multiple conversation sequences between Jung and other characters, but Sang-ho and cinematographer Pyo Sang-woo shoot her with her back facing the camera, in extreme close-ups with her hair covering her face, or from an oddly wide distance — all, in an attempt, it seems, to protect her and not let her be defined by the very facial features people remember her for. The intent here is honorable, but the effect is entirely the opposite: Sang-ho is so committed to critiquing society’s “ugly” image of Jung that his (seemingly defiant) decision not to give her face screen space or time further robs her of any identity. There’s little attempt to compensate for the lack of that: no special attention is given to express her personality through her body language, and little interest is shown in her interests beyond her perceived ugliness. Jung Young-hee in The Ugly is just a cipher then; or worse, just a plot detail that needs resolving. That’s the film’s ugliest truth.
DIRECTOR: Yeon Sang-ho; CAST: Kwon Hae-hyo, Shin Hyeon-bin, Shin Hyun-been; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: September 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 42 min.
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