Yeon Sang-ho’s The Ugly follows the investigation into the decades-long disappearance of a blind stamp carver’s wife. Hailed as a “living miracle of Korea,” Lim Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo) is being profiled by a documentary crew when the skeletal remains of his wife are unearthed. From there, the carver’s son, Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min), sets out to learn what happened to his mother, Jung Young-hee (Shin Hyun-been), 40 years ago, and The Ugly proceeds to play a long game with audiences that frustrates far more than it illuminates.
With the help of the documentary’s shrewd producer, Kim Su-jin (Han Ji-hyeon), Dong-hwan interviews Young-hee’s estranged family and her former co-workers, the latter of whom remember seeing her as an object of ridicule. Some feel guiltier than others for their treatment of her, and Dong-hwan is rattled by the mentions of his mother’s ugliness. Their disgust for her appearance doesn’t square with their understanding of her as a kind and moral person.
Throughout the film, Yeon deliberately puts viewers in the shoes of Dong-hwan and Su-jin, who have no first-hand knowledge of what Young-hee looked like. (Dong-hwan was a baby when his mother died, and as such has no memory of her.) It’s believed that no photographs of the woman exist, and when she’s seen in flashbacks, her face is kept out of frame or obscured by her long hair. Always it feels like the film is building to some profound revelation around what she looks like, and for a while you hold out hope that Yeon is chasing bigger game.
The Ugly hints at interesting lines of inquiry—about herd mentality, the way preconceptions shape the trajectory of a human life, and how traditional notions of beauty are rooted in sight—and Park is quietly moving in flashback as the young Yeong-gyu. But the film is more interested in the whodunnit of its mystery, and its answer proves to be disappointingly anticlimactic.
Frequent though the film’s flashbacks may be, the oppressive social constructs of the past are painted in such broad strokes as to render them unrecognizable. As for Dong-hwan and Su-jin, our intrepid investigators, they’re practically ciphers. In a way, then, The Ugly’s decision to obscure Young-hee’s face for so long proves fitting, as she’s a black hole where a character ought to be, emblematic of everything else that feels absent from the film.
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