Yeon Sang-ho’s “The Ugly” is a dour, depressing drama, a movie that gets so lost in its lethargic structure that it feels like a chore. A story of bone-deep cruelty, it’s the tale of a man learning the unfathomable about his mother and father, discovering that some truly awful secrets are buried under his family tree. The biggest problem with this frustrating film is structural, as so much of Yeon’s film consists of interviews—so much so that it’s broken up into chapters like “Interview 1” and “Interview 2”—and the writer/director doesn’t have enough to say about the process to lean so heavily on it.
“The Ugly” isn’t about storytelling or investigative journalism. It simply uses that language to tell a story that could have unfolded entirely in its flashbacks, highlighting how much it fails to even comment on how a man can hold secrets for generations. It’s ultimately a project that has too little to say and too little entertainment value to make up for that shallowness.
Im Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo) is a world-famous artisan, someone who is so deft at engraving that a journalist named Su-jin (Han Ji-hyeon) is doing a profile of his craft when she stumbles onto a much bigger story. While working on the project, Im’s son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min of “Decision to Leave”) gets a call revealing that someone found his mother’s remains, reopening the case of her disappearance from four decades ago. What happened to Young-hee? Su-jin convinces Dong-hwan to interview anyone who knew his mother to get to the bottom of how she died, quickly discovering that she lived a tortured existence.
Young-hee’s former co-workers reveal that her nickname was “Dung Ogre” because of how ugly everyone perceived her, although Yeon withholds her face in flashbacks to play what ultimately feels like a cheap game in the viewer’s imagination regarding how she actually looks. The nickname is multiply cruel, emerging from an incident when Young-hee’s awful boss at a garment factory was so vicious that she believed she couldn’t go to the bathroom and ended up defecating in her pants. Assaulted, abused, and mocked, Young-hee only found comfort in the young Im Yeong-gyu, who was born blind and didn’t understand why people laughed at the two of them in their village, only discovering over time that it was because they essentially believed his “ugly” new bride was tricking him.
Yeon proved himself an ace director of action in his breakthrough “Train to Busan,” which tells a story that consists almost exclusively of people responding to revelations that too easily roll out in overly scripted interviews, which makes it all the more shocking. Yes, there are flashbacks, but they exist almost entirely to visualize what the lead has just been told, making them doubly boring. There’s a version of this tale that discards all of the present-day material, telling the saga of a woman bullied enough that she comes to believe that only a blind man could love her, but Yeon isn’t actually interested in Young-hee, giving her way too little agency in her own story. She was a person that those who tortured her at the garment factory never sought to really get to know, and neither does the film about her.
The thematic thrust of “The Ugly”—everyone but poor Young-hee is being much uglier through their behavior than anyone could ever be physically—comes through in the first few scenes, leaving the film to unfold at a snail’s pace to the poor woman’s eventual death. Even the details around that are played like a twist, although Yeon the writer (adapting his own graphic novel) telegraphs every turn of this story, including anything that could theoretically be called surprising far too early. Worst of all, he strands the talented Park and Han in the role of listeners, flirting with developing their characters more in early scenes before becoming too invested in the past to care enough about the present.
This review was filed from the Toronto Film Festival after the film’s premiere. It opens on September 26th.
