Nothing stays buried in director Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan)’s latest, The Ugly. The film begins rather innocuously as television producer Kim Su-jin (Han Ji-hyeon) interviews Im Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo), a famous blind stamp engraver, alongside his adult son, Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min).
Initially it’s unclear what to make of the interview, which seems like a typical puff piece except for the moment that Su-jin becomes distracted by a curious scar across the back of Yeong-gyu’s wrist.
What begins as a small profile of a celebrated artist quickly transforms into a much larger story when father and son receive a life-changing call from police: the skeletal remains of Dong-hwan’s mother, Young-hee (Shin Hyun-been), have been discovered after a nearly forty year absence.
This kicks off both the film’s and the characters’ investigation into what happened to the missing woman, which is chronicled in The Ugly over the course of five interviews and an epilogue.
It’s a clever plot device because Dong-hwan knows as little about his mother as the audience. He grew up without any pictures of her and his father never talked about her, which transforms the absent woman from an actual human being into a mystery to be solved.
As the investigation proceeds, the interviews expand in scope to include Young-hee’s extended family, her former co-workers, and her shady boss, Baek Joo-sang (Im Seong-jae) at the garment factory. With each new conversation, Ms. Kim and Dong-hwan paint a portrait of a woman that time has nearly forgotten.
This extends to the audience for the majority of the film’s runtime because the director makes the unorthodox choice not to show Young-hee’s face. Even in the frequent flashbacks interspersed throughout the film, her face is either covered, or she is shot in darkness or from behind.
The title of the film offers us one hint as to why and, in this capacity, Yeon Sang-ho’s script pulls no punches. It quickly comes out that Young-hee had an extremely ugly face and characters are not shy about describing it as such. (It’s seriously confronting how comfortable strangers are telling Dong-hwan that his mother was a monster).
As each layer of the onion is peeled back, however, the truth becomes significantly more complicated. As individual motives come under scrutiny, the film encourages us to question what is fact and what is fiction when it comes to Young-hee. Can it truly be as simple as “she was a thief who stole from her family and ran away at a young age”? It’s possible there’s a kernel of truth there, but the sizeable inheritance that the extended family doesn’t want to share can’t be discounted.
It’s also not as simple as Young-hee was a lazy worker with bad hygiene. It doesn’t take long to suss out that the working conditions of the factory were borderline inhumane and that the well-respected boss was actually corrupt.
These complications are tropes of the mystery subgenre, but they work here because Yeon Sang-ho is just as interested in the investigation as he is in exploring who Young-hee was, how individuals responded to her, and what that says about people. The truth (naturally) is more complicated than it initially seems.
As the film progresses and Dong-hwan gets closer to uncovering what happened it becomes increasingly clear that Young-hee was mistreated for reasons that are both cavalier and shallow; her perceived worth was based entirely on her physical appearance. Young-hee was not worthy of love, time, or friendship because she was “ugly.”
The film’s resolution – as the identity of the killer(s), their reasoning, and even what follows once the truth is known – doesn’t entirely live up to expectations, however. This is, in large part, because several details are too clearly telegraphed, but also because by this point in the narrative, it is evident what kind of murky moral sandbox Yeon Sang-ho is playing in.
The Ugly aims for a shocking and confronting ending that upends everything that has come before, but for attentive viewers, the multi-layered finale is simply proof of what Yeon Sang-ho has been cynically saying all along: the real ugliness…is in us all.
The Ugly had its world premiere at TIFF 2025. The film does not currently have a North American release date.
The post ‘The Ugly’ TIFF Review – ‘Train to Busan’ Director’s Latest Investigates a 40 Year Old Murder appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
