The Ugly has director Yeon Sang-ho moving away from the spectacle of Train to Busan and Peninsula into a small scale drama, shifting horrors from zombies to one of humanity’s darkest traits: the prejudice and disdain for the “ugly.”
The film blends a documentary within a film structure with a mystery drama, purposefully modest in scale. It was shot in just three weeks with a skeleton crew of twenty. Adapted from Yeon’s own graphic novel, the story follows Dong-hwan, son of a blind artisan, who first assists a documentarian capturing his father’s achievements. That changes when he learns his mother, long believed to have abandoned the family, has in fact been dead for forty years. Together with Su-jin, the documentary producer, he begins to investigate her murder, uncovering that her appearance may have played a role in her tragic fate.
Much of the film is spent with Dong-hwan and Su-jin gathering fragments of her past from coworkers and former bosses, slowly piecing together the story of her life and disappearance. These conversations, while subdued, are engaging because of the empathetic reactions of the two investigators, which give weight to what could have been flat testimony. In these moments, the film gestures toward the generational divide in how beauty has been perceived, contrasting the cruel judgments of the past with a more hopeful, modern view.
The central mystery sustains attention, yet the film’s themes remain at a distance, never quite expanding into the universal conversation it seeks. The backstory scenes focus heavily on what happened, rarely on how the characters felt, and when emotions do surface they are often spelled out rather than conveyed. What emerges is a film that delivers a compelling narrative and noteworthy themes, even if it only partly sparks the deeper reflection it reaches for.