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Yeon Sang-ho, the director who electrified global audiences with the breathless panic of Train to Busan (2016), returns to live-action cinema with a very different kind of horror in The Ugly. Gone are the snarling zombies, the claustrophobic train compartments, the apocalyptic chase sequences. In their place: a slow drip of testimonies, recorded interviews, and flashbacks that seek to uncover the mystery behind a mother’s disappearance four decades earlier. What could have been a taut and psychologically incisive investigative drama instead becomes a sluggish, strangely inert exercise in storytelling—one that raises urgent questions about cruelty, beauty, and the monstrosity of ordinary people, but fails to embody them with the clarity or conviction that Yeon has proven capable of before.
The premise is promising. Im Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo), a blind master engraver of national renown, is the subject of a documentary directed by the young journalist Kim Su-jin (Han Ji-hyun). While the cameras are rolling, Yeong-gyu’s son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min, of Decision to Leave) receives a phone call: skeletal remains have been discovered, the bones of his mother, Young-hee, who vanished mysteriously in the 1980s. The family secret, long buried, quite literally resurfaces. What begins as an art-world profile transforms into a chilling excavation of abuse, humiliation, and familial betrayal.
From here, Yeon structures his film around a series of interviews—“Interview 1,” “Interview 2,” and so on—conducted by Dong-hwan and Su-jin with people who once knew Young-hee. Each interlocutor adds another layer to the grim portrait of a woman so relentlessly ridiculed that her identity seemed to shrink in the eyes of others to one cruel nickname: “Dung Ogre.” The epithet was born from an incident in a garment factory where a tyrannical boss denied Young-hee the dignity of relieving herself, forcing her into public humiliation. For decades afterward, that story metastasized into a legend of ugliness, her physical appearance obsessively described but never revealed. Even in flashbacks, Yeon keeps her face obscured, an artistic choice that at first promises mystery but eventually curdles into a gimmick, denying the character the humanity the story ostensibly mourns.
The thematic skeleton is visible from the outset: the “ugly” one is not the ostracized woman, but the society that mocks her, exploits her, and erases her. And yet the film’s failure lies not in its message but in its delivery. By relying so heavily on interviews that often feel interchangeable, Yeon drains his narrative of momentum. The characters speak their testimonies; the camera obligingly flashes back to re-enact the same memories. The result is not an accumulation of insight but a redundancy of tone. What should gather intensity with each revelation instead becomes repetitive, flattening a story that ought to pulse with suspense.
This structural miscalculation also has a devastating effect on character. Dong-hwan, who ought to be at the emotional core of the film—the son who never knew his mother’s face, who must reconcile his admiration for his father with the possibility of his complicity—ends up sidelined, his agency confined largely to listening. Su-jin, who begins as a potentially probing investigator, fares even worse: she becomes a device to move the interviews along, rather than a character in her own right. The irony is that Yeon, who once proved so adept at staging action sequences that revealed character through survival, here immobilizes his leads in a listening booth.
The greatest casualty, however, is Young-hee herself (played in flashback by Shin Hyun-been). While her tragedy is the axis on which the entire narrative turns, she is rarely allowed interiority. She becomes a subject narrated by others, seen only in fragments, her face literally hidden from us. The gesture might have been intended as a critique of how women’s identities are effaced by cruelty and gossip, but in practice it robs the audience of empathy, reducing Young-hee to a symbol rather than a person. Her story—of being loved by a blind man who could not see her supposed ugliness, of being mocked for entrapping him, of enduring a lifetime of humiliation—deserved the intimacy of her own voice. Instead, Yeon perpetuates the very marginalization he seeks to indict.
This is all the more frustrating because flashes of brilliance do appear. Park Jeong-min’s dual performance, playing both Dong-hwan in the present and the younger Yeong-gyu in flashbacks, anchors the film with a trembling intensity. His embodiment of two generations allows the narrative to collapse past and present into a single, haunted continuum. Kwon Hae-hyo brings gravitas to the role of the blind engraver, a man whose artistic genius cannot compensate for the personal wreckage he leaves behind. And the cinematography, bleak yet precise, often finds striking images: factory machines grinding like indifferent monsters, the obscured figure of Young-hee bent under the weight of scorn, the silent countryside where bones reemerge from the soil.
But these flourishes cannot compensate for the overarching tonal confusion. The Ugly oscillates between murder mystery, social critique, and family melodrama, never committing fully to any one form. Its pacing—at once ponderous and fragmented—blunts the impact of its revelations. And Yeon’s adaptation of his own 2018 graphic novel seems uncertain about what cinematic form should bring to the story beyond literalizing its panels. Where Train to Busan was kinetic, visceral, and unrelenting, The Ugly feels airless, a film more concerned with testimony than with lived experience.
That said, the project is not without cultural resonance. South Korean cinema has long probed the relationship between appearance and social worth, from the class allegories of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite to the surgical body horror of Kim Ki-duk. In that lineage, The Ugly positions itself as an indictment of superficial cruelty, a reminder that beauty and monstrosity are cultural constructions as much as physical traits. Its bleak worldview—people are far uglier in their behavior than in their bodies—lands with grim precision. The problem is that the film delivers this thesis almost immediately and then repeats it, chapter after chapter, until the insight dulls into monotony.
For Yeon, whose career has traversed animation (The King of Pigs), festival acclaim (The Fake), and blockbuster spectacle (Train to Busan), The Ugly marks his first theatrical feature in five years. That hiatus raises expectations that the film only partially meets. Admirers of his earlier work may miss the pulse, the urgency, the sense that the camera itself was alive. Here, the stillness feels less contemplative than exhausted.
In the end, The Ugly is a film about cruelty that risks committing its own subtle cruelties—toward its characters, toward its audience, toward its own potential. It dares to ask what ugliness really means, only to answer too quickly, too obviously, and too repetitively. The bones of a great story are here: a mother erased, a son searching, a society complicit in both. But like the skeletal remains unearthed at the film’s outset, what emerges on screen is incomplete, missing the flesh and blood that might have made it live.
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