If the name Yeon Sang-ho is vaguely familiar to you, it’s likely because you’ve seen his 2016 Korean zombie movie Train to Busan. That and many of his other films have included a great deal of special effects, but with his latest movie The Ugly, he appears to have turned over a new leaf. This low-budget cold-case murder mystery opens this weekend at AMC Grapevine Mills, and it proves that he can tell a good story without all the bells and whistles.
The story begins in the present day with a TV reporter (Han Ji-hyun) interviewing Lim Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo), an old man who runs his own print shop and hand-carves beautiful personalized stamps bearing people’s names despite having been blind since birth. During the interview, his son Lim Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min) receives a call from the police, who have found his mother’s skeletal remains, which appear to have been buried for at least 40 years. With the help of that journalist, Dong-hwan starts canvassing everyone who knew his mother. He’s haunted by the lack of a photograph to display at her funeral, but everyone assures him that there are no pictures of her because she was hideously ugly.
Beyond this appalling touch, there’s more in store. Yeong-gyu tells his son that his mother had no family, only for two of her sisters to turn up and demand her share of their father’s inheritance. (Maybe you can understand him wanting to pretend that they don’t exist.) One of the aunts becomes so nauseous in the morgue that she knocks her sister’s bones off the coroner’s table in her haste to escape, which almost makes the coroner cry. Dong-hwan connects his mother’s death to the rapes that her boss (Im Seong-jae) was committing among his factory workers, but when he and the reporter confront the boss — who has suffered a stroke and lives in a hovel with only pictures of naked women to keep him company — the old man points the finger squarely at Yeong-gyu without knowing that he’s talking to Yeong-gyu’s son.
The flashbacks to the 1980s are mostly well-integrated into the story, and while Dong-hwan’s mother (Shin Hyun-been) does appear in them, Yeon refuses to give us a good look at her face until the very end. Nevertheless, Yeon persistently spotlights the performances in this movie rather than the plot, and he’s rewarded with terrific performances by both Kwon and Park, who does double duty as both the sighted son and the younger version of the blind father. What emerges is a portrait of the unremitting cruelty in the shortened life of Dong-hwan’s mother, from her own family, from that horrible boss, from the fellow factory workers who turn on her even though she’s trying to protect them, and finally from the husband who loved her but ended up mistaking her love for the mockery he got from everyone else. All this gives The Ugly a bitter tragic force that you seldom find, either in Korean films or movies from anywhere else.
The Ugly
Starring Park Jeong-min and Kwon Hae-hyo. Written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Not rated.
