THE UGLY (2025)

This is the story of a man whose blind father is the subject of a documentary. His is dad is an engraver of note. As the film is being made, word is recieved that the body of his mother has been found. His mother had disappeared 40 years earlier. As the authorities tries to sort things out, so does the son and the filmmaker. Where it leads is into some dark places.

I'm mixed on THE UGLY.  Part of it is that the film is a catalog of cruelty, and in today's world I don't want to see that, partly it crushed me because in the mother I saw my mom, but mostly it didn't work because this didn't need to be a flashback film.

The film is essentially a look at how society views beauty. The woman at the film's center is someone who is deemed ugly. She marries a blind man because suppsedly only a blind man could love her.  Because she is ugly is the focus of incredible cruelty and brutality.  She is tormented for no good reason and it becomes incredibly tough to take. The film is a damning portrait of Korean society and the human condition. However it is not a film that you want to watch for fun. The cruelty is crushing. Even allowing that the world is now a cruel place thanks to certain leaders normalizing it, this is hard to take.

The real problem with the film is the structure.  Told as a series of interviews and flashbacks,  There isn't really a reason for how ts done since the interviews often overlap the flashbacks and it feels reptative. We don't need to be told and shown. The other key problem is that the film jumps through hoops so that until the finale we never see the supposedly ugly woman. The filmmakers make it laughable that we are not seeing the face. Of course the reveal  isn't surprising since while she may be a tad plain, she wasn't ugly, more so of she had access to makeup. I wish they had just told the story without the the tricks.

This leads me to something personal, which is that there was a point where my mother got sick and the illness changed her appearance. She felt she had become ugly. She had not, but she thought she had. In the mother on screen I saw my mom. It bothered me deeply and made me not want to relive that.

I don't want to make you think the film is a total, mess, it's not it's well made and beautifully acted.  I can understand why some people love the film.  At the same time it didn't work for me.