Could be Uglier
Animator and zombie maestro Yeon Sang-ho cooks up a mystery about crime, punishment and beauty but only half bakes it.
The Ugly
Director: Yeon Sang-ho • Writer: Yeon Sang-ho
Starring: Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, Han Ji-hyeon, Shin Hyun-been
South Korea • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong September 18 • IIA
Grade: C
When you see Yeon Sang-ho’s name above the title, at this stage of the game that’s a good thing. In a not very long time he’s proven to be one of South Korea’s most creative – and gleefully grim – filmmakers. Train to Busan made him famous but his animated features The King of Pigs and Seoul Station are a couple of the most stylish, bitchy, thought-provoking films of their respective years (2011 and 2016). So good in fact I’m willing to let Peninsula slide. So there are high hopes for The Ugly | 얼굴, a social commentary murder mystery about a woman so fuckin’ hideous she hides her face from the world and the blind engraver she marries back in the day.
The thing about The Ugly is that it has a lot of good ideas floating around in its ether but they seem to have no where to go. This is Yeon at both his most ambitious and his most unfocused, and it makes for frustrating viewing. Is it about beauty standards as they apply to women? Is it about our perception of beauty and expectations of such, as applies to everyone? Is this a screed about the sensationalisation of the news? How the past doesn’t stay there? Male entitlement? All of the above? Who knows? Yeon doesn’t seem to be sure himself.
Eye of the beholder
It’s too bad, because there’s something there, bubbling beneath the surface but just unable to spring from the ooze fully formed. The story starts in present day Seoul with blind artisanal engraver and chop-maker Lim Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo) being interviewed for a news programme about his life and work. He’s a living miracle so on and so forth. The show’s producer is the hungry and gloriously DGAF Kim Su-jin (Han Ji-hyeon, Seobok), who Lim’s son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min, Harbin) keeps a wary eye on. When Dong-hwan’s missing-for-40-years mother and Yeong-gyu’s wife, Jung Young-hee (Shin Hyun-been, Take Point) turns up as a pile of bones in a hillside grave, Su-jin’s Spidey senses kick in, and she wants to get to the bottom of the mystery. Both Lims were of the belief she ran away, so when Su-jin starts digging up nugget after sordid nugget as she looks into the missing woman’s life, both are shaken to the core. In flashbacks to the 1970s, we see how Yeong-gyu (Park as a young man) and the poor pariah that was Young-hee met and married, why she was so reviled and bullied by everyone in the garment factory she worked at, and what the factory’s pre-#MeToo scumbag boss Baek Ju-sang (Im Sung-jae), may have had to do with her death. Tip of the iceberg as they say.
Young-hee’s story is tragic of course, this is a Korean film, but it’s revelations are layered in such a way as to bring up a new twist, or more of a new theme really, with each one, and Yeon fakes us out a few times by playing on our collective “knowledge” of how movies work. Expectations of what the “beastly,’ “so ugly,” “Oh my god she’s so hideous,” Young-hee looked like – if you think we’ll get to see her at all – will vary from person to person, making it a clever bit of reflexive story-telling. Whether you want a grody creature or a spin on the classic The Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder” says more about you than it does about the film. But beyond that there are a lot of dropped thematic examinations and half-cooked ideas that muck up the waters. As Dong-won slowly thaws to Su-jin it looks like an investigative team-up, a good ol’ fashioned procedural, is on the way. That never happens. Young-hee’s long lost relatives, who also thought she ran away, show up to flirt with big bad status but are left in the wings just as abruptly. And the final motive? WTF? The cast is game, the retro production design is tactile in its emerging economy griminess, and at the heart of it all is Young-hee, a truly compelling character whose fate we want to understand, but for frustratingly intangible reasons it never gels. A rare misfire for Yeon – but not on a Peninsula level.