‘The Ugly’ (얼굴) Review: In Yeon Sang-ho’s Dark Mystery, It’s the Soul That Needs the Surgery [B+] TIFF
Train to Busan’s Yeon Sang-ho returns to the low budget mystery thriller genre by adapting his debut graphic novel (Face) into a feature film. The result is The Ugly (얼굴), a film with a simple unsettling mystery at its core, but the more the layers get peeled back, the more it reveals a portrait of something bigger and uglier.
Our story begins with a documentary in the process of filming, and the story of this doc is Im Yeong-gyoo (Kwon Hae-hyo), a blind artisan with a talent for hand-carving beautiful stamps. To the current generation, especially in the eyes of the young documentary producer Kim Su-jin (Han Ji-hyeon), he comes across as the product of Korea’s “rapid growth” era of the 1970s – a man who overcame great adversity to become the well-renowned artist he is today. His son, Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min), is a man who respects him greatly. Maybe he doesn’t fully understand his father, but he looks at him through the lens of admiration.
And then one day Dong-hwan gets a phone call from the police – they’ve found the body of his deceased mother. Actually, it’s not even a body. They found skeletal remains. That is because it looked like she was buried into the side of a mountain and has been dead for 40 years. Shocked by the news and curious about the mother he never knew, Dong-hwan is eager to investigate. But the unfamiliar relatives are of no help. They dodge his questions or give cryptic answers. No one wants to talk about his mother. Even more peculiar, no one has a picture of her. And they all say the same thing – she was ugly.
The mystery at the core of the film is a remarkably fascinating one. Structured through five interviews, from relatives to former coworkers, the film slowly uncovers bits and pieces of who Dong-hwan’s mother was, as the film weaves in a flashback narrative. Park Jeong-min takes on a remarkable challenge, playing the son in the present timeline as well as the younger version of the blind father in the flashback timeline. Needless to say, he performs like two completely different people, even nailing the mannerisms Kwon Hae-hyo has as the present-day father.
As new supporting characters get introduced and new subplots arise, it becomes tempting to put the pieces together before the film does. While I can say some of the twists were expected, they came at the right time in the plot and they’re handled as properly earned escalations. Yeon Sang-ho carefully pieces his story together in the editing room, showing just enough of an event in the past, followed by the same scene but from a slightly different perspective later. Unlike other mysteries that could lose their steam, The Ugly keeps its mystery alive to the very end because the full context of the picture is cleverly withheld until we get to hear about the same event from every person.
Yeon Sang-ho talked about his inspiration behind The Ugly as a fascinating juxtaposition between two people; the father who became a symbolic figure of a country’s rapid economic growth, and the mother who bore the brunt end of that era’s underlying hatred and prejudice. Years and then decades will pass by, as events become history, and the truth becomes hidden behind grand words like “progress,” “achievement,” and “success.”
Though the center of the mystery is focused on one woman and her identity on a plot level, the film is very much a portrait of an era, of a culture, and its people on a story level. Seeing people speak of Dong-hwan’s mother as ugly brings to mind how Bong Joon-ho brought the concept of smell into class divide in Parasite – the ugliness isn’t so much a beauty standard commentary so much as it is a representation of the trivial excuses people make up to justify hating someone. When the full picture is finally revealed (quite literally, actually), and we see the truth of what happened, how it happened, why it happened, how every person was – none of it is pleasant. The Ugly is, at its core, a mean-spirited reflection at how mean-spirited people are. When it is so easy to just forget and let time erase everything, we can only hope that enough people out there have enough courage and empathy to look inward and do the right thing.
Grade: B+
This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where The Ugly (얼굴) had its world premiere. Well Go USA Entertainment will release the film theatrically in the U.S. on September 26.
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