TIFF50
Some screenings end in chatter, others in applause. The Ugly ended in silence. At its Toronto showing today, the final sequence held the audience still, caught between revelation and grief.
Yeon Sang-ho, long miscast in Western press as “the zombie guy,” has delivered a film without spectacle, without monsters that snarl and bite, and yet it is one of the most monstrous works in his filmography. It is also one of the most devastating. The Ugly is not about the creatures of Train to Busan but about the faces societies erase, the women shamed into silence and the men who mistake that silence for forgiveness. It is, in every sense, a heart-achingly beautiful mystery that will stay with you through the foyer, down the escalator and out onto the street; only then will the sun and breeze jolt you out of Sang-ho’s spell and begrudgingly back into reality.
Yeon Sang-ho has spent over two decades constructing what critics sometimes call the “Yeon-iverse”: an interlinked, restless set of works that oscillate between animation, live action, streaming, and blockbuster. From the animated ferocity of The King of Pigs (2011) and The Fake (2013) to the global thunderclap of Train to Busan (2016), Yeon has always been less interested in genre fireworks than in human corruption. Even his zombies were metaphors for selfishness on a speeding train.
With The Ugly, Yeon circles back to his earliest obsessions. The film adapts his 2018 graphic novel Face, a work that predates his international breakthrough but remained, until now, unfilmed. Described as an “allegory of Korea’s growth-centric modern and contemporary history,” with characters designed as emblems: the blind artisan Im Yeong-gyu as the face of resilience; Jung Young-hee, his vanished wife, as the face of prejudice buried under progress; their son Dong-hwan as the inheritor of trauma and witness to what the state tried to erase.
If Train to Busan gave Yeon international fame, The Ugly may be the work that secures his reputation as a filmmaker willing to pare back spectacle to expose something rawer, more corrosive and enduring. It is a solid founding stone in the path to his legacy.
The plot appears deceptively simple. Im Yeong-gyu has been blind since birth, but he becomes a revered master of hand-engraved stamps, crafting beauty he can never see. His wife Jung Young-hee vanishes when their son is still an infant. Four decades later, her skeletal remains are found, and the possibility of murder surfaces. Dong-hwan, the son who has no memory of her, joins forces with Kim Su-jin, a documentary producer filming his father’s life, to uncover the truth.
The structure is fractured: the mystery unfolds through five interview-style chapters, each peeling back layers of memory. Estranged relatives, factory co-workers, seamstresses, and finally the father himself deliver testimonies that gradually expose what really happened. The effect is less crime-solving than excavation. Every new detail feels like a shard of bone, fragile evidence of a woman the world tried to forget.
The brilliance lies in Yeon’s refusal to show Jung Young-hee’s face. Played with extraordinary control by Shin Hyun-been, she becomes a presence built from gestures, shoulders, voice; a woman denied visibility both within the diegesis and within cinematic form. Her facelessness is not gimmick but metaphor: the punishment of women who defy patriarchy is to be erased, and the punishment of their families is to live in the shadow of that erasure.
One of the film’s most searing sequences revolves around a woman recalling sexual assault. She describes how her shame, her inability to speak, was interpreted by the perpetrator as forgiveness. It is an unbearable moment, not sensationalised but delivered with flat finality. Yeon allows the line to hang in the air like a toxin.
This is where The Ugly transcends its own genre trappings. It is not just a mystery; it is an anatomy of shame, humiliation, and how societies mistake silence for consent. Jung Young-hee, working in the garment factories of 1970s Seoul, becomes a figure who refuses to conform, who insists on dignity and is punished by disappearance. As the director’s statement makes clear, she embodies “the era’s underlying hatred and prejudice, hidden beneath grand narratives like ‘growth’ and ‘success’”.
The erasure of her face is therefore the erasure of the self. Psychoanalytically, this can be read as a form of symbolic castration: the removal of visibility, of recognition, as a punishment for transgression. Yeon has always been fascinated by how societies discipline bodies; here, he shows how they annihilate presence.
Audiences who come expecting the kinetic thrills of Train to Busan will find a different kind of horror. The monsters here are not undead but all too human. Yeon’s continuity with earlier works like The King of Pigs and The Fake is evident, both portraits of cruelty within ordinary social systems.
In The Ugly, the garment factory boss Baek Joo-sang (Im Seong-jae) presents himself as benevolent, paying workers on time, smiling, photographing them like family. Yet his benevolence is a mask. The true horror is not gore but the smiling face that hides exploitation, abuse, and violence. Yeon drives this point relentlessly: the worst monsters wear kindness like a costume.
The austerity of production becomes part of the film’s power. Made in just thirteen shooting days with a crew of barely twenty, The Ugly nevertheless conjures 1970s Seoul with astonishing authenticity. Sets were built from scratch to replace locations that modernisation had erased; props down to utility bills and clock-in cards were hand-crafted.
Cinematographer Pyo Sang-woo divides past and present through distinct palettes: warm, saturated retro tones for the factory era, cooler ambient tones for the son’s present-day investigation. The decision never to show Young-hee’s face required constant invention, framing her through mise-en-scène, shadow, and partial gestures and this constraint becomes visual poetry. There are moments when the camera lingers a fraction of a second longer as it pans up her face but each time the view is blocked. This act of taunting the audience mirrors the themes of mockery throughout the film.
Music, by Chai Min-joo, reinforces the temporal split: strings for the past, vibraphones and pads for the present, with sound design woven into the score to create unease.
And then there are the performances. Park Jeong-min, taking on his first dual role, plays both the young Yeong-gyu and his son Dong-hwan, a decision that literalises intergenerational trauma. Kwon Hae-hyo lends weight to the older Yeong-gyu, while Shin Hyun-been’s faceless Young-hee is a masterclass in physical expression. Each embodies the paradox of visibility and invisibility.
If there is a single thesis to The Ugly, it is this: trauma always finds a way out. Forty years of silence are broken not by institutions, not by progress, but by a son who cannot bear absence. Yeon makes the past intrude through testimonies, flashbacks, and finally bones. The son becomes the vessel through which repressed violence resurfaces. The sins of the father will always be due their penance.
To explain the ending would weaken it. It doesn’t tie things up with answers, but with rupture. The central absence remains, and in the final sequence, as father and son face what cannot be undone, the film itself bears witness.
At TIFF, those last minutes brought tears to many in the room. The silence was not emptiness but reverence: the weight of something too raw to applaud. This is not melodrama but tragedy, and all the more tragic for its roots in reality; a story in which beauty is created by a blind man, ugliness inflicted on a woman, and both converge in a son’s desperate need for truth.
The Ugly is Yeon Sang-ho’s boldest film to date, not because of scale but because of restraint. It is a film that dismantles spectacle to show how shame, humiliation, and patriarchy scar generations. It is a must-see, heart-achingly beautiful, and devastating in its clarity.
As the credits rolled in Toronto, and the audience filed out in silence, the film did not let go. Yeon’s faceless woman lingered as proof that some traumas cannot be buried, that some mysteries are too painful to solve, and that cinema still has the power to make absence unforgettable.
The Ugly has its World Premiere at TIFF September 09, 2025
Leave a Reply