Director: Yeon Sang-ho
Writer: Yeon Sang-ho
Stars: Kwon Hae-hyo, Shin Hyeon-bin, Shin Hyun-been
Synopsis: A man investigates the truth behind his long-lost mother’s death.
A few months after Yeon Sang-ho released his best-ever movie, Revelations, it’s only natural that he follows it up with his worst-ever movie. Why natural, you say? Well, to put it simply: an auteur has to miss eventually to reveal, like us, their most human nature. Rian Johnson delivered his first miss – in the form of a contractual obligation – at TIFF with Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, and now Sang-ho gives us The Ugly, an investigative thriller that is, as the title suggests, ugly in form and spirit.
Ugly not in its subject matter, although it treats many difficult themes in the time periods it depicts within South Korea, but in the manner in which they’re treated. This is a deeply distasteful, contemptuous piece of work that barely contains anything of note in a cyclical story that never justifies its framing device, if only to build up to a reveal that most will already see coming by the time all the pieces are laid out in the movie’s first ten minutes. Instead of smartly subverting expectations, as he has done so many times in his career, or bathing in genre pleasures like Revelations, Psychokinesis, or his most well-known and acclaimed work, Train to Busan, Sang-ho stays in minimalist platitudes that make his follow-up to the most outstanding and aesthetically exciting movie of his career devoid of any genuine interest.
The movie immediately grabs our attention with a crash-zoom on a stamp, the only aesthetic flourish we’ll see from a staunch formalist who decides to focus all his attention on characters and dialogue instead of showcasing his most treasured hallmarks. That said, this feels like a refreshing change of pace for Sang-ho, who, after Train to Busan, has expanded his aesthetic sensibilities and given us many psychologically twisted and profoundly nihilistic works, both in film and television (notably, all of his collaborations with Netflix). On paper, stripping a film down to its primal elements and crafting a chamber piece where the truth slowly unfolds through “interviews” that essentially act as interrogations regarding the protagonist’s mother, feels compelling. However, unlike one of his previous misfires, JUNG_E, which held our attention with staggering visual effects and a dreamlike sense of aesthetics worthy of The Wachowskis’ most cerebral pictures, The Ugly never justifies this minimalist framing device, nor its “interviews,” in which the movie is broken into.
The interviews themselves aren’t bad and progressively provide the audience with enough information to understand precisely what happened to Lim’s mother, Jung Young-hee (Shin Hyun-been), who, we learn, was consistently objectified and demeaned due to her appearance (hence the title of the film). The problem lies in how this information is treated, and then repeated through extended flashbacks that attempt to posit the movie as a groundbreaking denunciation of the absurd body standards women had to face in South Korea in the past, but end up being profoundly ill-conceived in its depiction of heavy-handed material, such as objectification, and eventually, assault.
In those segments, The Ugly feels more like torture porn than a drama that wants to uncover the secrets that caused the death of Lim’s mother, who sadly lived a life of misery until the very end. Astute audience members know exactly how a story like this will end, no matter the multiple twists and turns Sang-ho throws at us. As much as it tries to destabilize and overthrow all pre-conceived storytelling norms, anyone who pays attention knows precisely how the filmmaker will wrap it up. It’s almost laughable that he thinks such a reveal will repurpose the movie and blow audiences away. Anyone who pays a modicum of attention to the film quickly realizes that the bulk of The Ugly’s story is not about Lim trying to obtain more information about his mother, but actively tracking the sole photo that proves her existence.
At the time, there were no photos of her mother, because she allegedly “looked like a monster,” and the only one she took was in her job recruitment file to ensure she was who she said she was. Without me saying anything else, and the title priming you to think one way, what do you think is in the picture? Yeah, it’s exactly what you think. There’s no mystery, suspense, or thrills to be had in a drama that takes itself far more seriously than other bleak Sang-ho projects, which almost always have points of dark humor inside their dark stories to alleviate the tension slightly. Moreover, Sang-ho always had fun with how he would shoot multiple sequences and found different ways to blow us away, visualizing some of his most ambitious stories.
Sang-ho wanted to experiment with making a low-budget film, which is commendable. It can usually examine the director at his most open and vulnerable. No flashy aesthetics will distract him. All he can do is shoot his actors with only the camera acting as the artifice between the audience and the film’s diegesis. However, a low budget doesn’t mean “no creativity,” and this dour affair is so devoid of anything that made him a household name within South Korean cinema and genre aficionados as a whole that it feels relatively weightless. The characters aren’t interesting, the film is lethargically paced, and it offers nothing visually to set it apart. Worse yet, the staging of sequences involving extreme abuse is repugnant. Of course, feeling uncomfortable and disturbed at the sight of these sections is the point. However, there is a difference between trying to raise awareness of a real and urgent issue and exploitation, which The Ugly falls into the latter.
It is a profoundly unpleasant movie that has no idea what it wants to say about the treatment of women in South Korea, other than shocking audiences with a bevy of disturbing sequences, both physical and psychological. And the twist, which should theoretically surprise you, doesn’t shock, nor make us realize exactly what went down the way the filmmaker hoped. The movie, however, does deliver on its title, but not in its intended effect. The Ugly possesses ugly intentions, and the resulting 102 minutes that follow are some of the most ill-advised cinema of the year.
