If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where does that leave the blind? Im Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula), a sightless stamp engraver in his twilight years, found love with a garment worker he married. It vanished when she abandoned her husband and infant son 40 years prior.
Now an adult, Im Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min, Decision to Leave) receives unexpected news from the police: Not only have his mother’s remains been found, but she didn’t disappear as assumed; she was murdered. This news arrives amid a crew shooting a documentary about the elder Im, so the producer (Shin Hyeon-bin, Beasts Clawing at Straws) helps Dong-hwan discovered what happened to the woman he never knew.
What they find on the surface is unimaginable cruelty from greedy relatives and asshole co-workers who nicknamed her “Dung Ogre.” All insist she was so hideous-looking — hence the film’s title of The Ugly — no photos exist. Most barbarous is the treatment from her piggish employer (Im Sung-jae, Emergency Declaration). Dong-kwan’s father sums it up with “What we see as beautiful, we respect; the opposite, we scorn.
The Ugly represents a departure for filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho, the creative conductor behind the Train to Busan franchise. Not particularly knotty in plotting, his film solves its mystery through simple sequential peeling of layers. With each interview, Dong-hwan is torn between wanting to know and afraid what he might learn next. Both leads are marvelous, but especially Park. In his incredible final shot, Sang-ho doesn’t leave us with a spinning top, but delivers the closure we need, only to rip open a whole new line of questioning. —Rod Lott