The Ugly — Yeon Sang-ho Delivers a Dark, Melancholic Family Tragedy

Park Jeong-min uncovers disturbing family secrets in Yeon Sang-ho’s somber psychological drama The Ugly.

Review: The Ugly — Yeon Sang-ho Trades Monsters for a Haunting Family Tragedy

South Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho has built his global reputation on apocalyptic dread and genre spectacle. From the relentless zombie chaos of Train to Busan to the supernatural paranoia of Hellbound and the bleak follow-up Peninsula, Yeon’s work often explores how humanity behaves when pushed into extraordinary horror.

But with The Ugly, the director pivots away from monsters and outbreaks toward something more intimate—and in many ways, far more disturbing.

Premiering at Toronto International Film Festival and arriving digitally March 10 through Well Go USA Entertainment, the film is a melancholic psychological drama centered on buried family trauma and the lies we inherit.

The story follows Im Dong-geun, played by Park Jeong-min, a young man preparing to celebrate his father’s recognition as a revered craftsman. His father is famous for creating intricate stamps used for official borders and documents—delicate works of art that once helped families survive in a time when poverty in Korea left few avenues for stability.

The acclaim surrounding the father’s work becomes even more remarkable when you learn that he is blind—an artist who has never seen the very creations that earned him admiration.

But that celebration collapses when authorities uncover human remains believed to belong to Dong-geun’s long-missing mother.

The discovery forces father and son to return to the rural community where their family story began. What starts as a search for answers quickly becomes an excavation of a past the town has never forgotten.

As Dong-geun speaks with locals, a strange narrative begins to form about his mother. Those who knew her describe a kind, gentle woman—but one marked by a reputation for being deeply unattractive. In the town’s collective memory, she was remembered less for her character than for her appearance.

On the surface, the relationship between Dong-geun’s parents sounds like a beautiful contradiction: a blind man and a woman dismissed for her looks finding love despite society’s judgments. A story that suggests love can transcend superficial boundaries.

But The Ugly slowly dismantles that romantic illusion.

The deeper Dong-geun digs into his parents’ history, the more unsettling the truth becomes. What once sounded like a touching love story gradually reveals itself as something darker, exposing the fragile mythology families build to hide painful realities.

Yeon constructs the film like a slow psychological autopsy. The pacing is deliberate, allowing conversations, silences, and uncomfortable recollections to reveal the emotional wreckage beneath the family’s past.

Fans of Yeon’s previous work may notice familiar stylistic fingerprints—the careful framing, the controlled tension, the way dread quietly builds through character rather than spectacle. But the horror here is not supernatural.

Instead, The Ugly becomes a human monster story—though not in the way genre fans might expect.

There are no creatures lurking in shadows or grotesque transformations waiting around the corner. The terror is emotional and moral, rooted in betrayal, shame, and the realization that the people we idolize may be capable of unimaginable cruelty.

And perhaps most unsettling of all, the film challenges the idea of who the real “monster” is.

What initially sounds like a grotesque portrait of a woman dismissed for her appearance evolves into a tragic meditation on perception, cruelty, and the quiet violence inflicted by societal expectations.

The film also features strong supporting performances from Kwon Hae-hyo (Peninsula), Shin Hyun-been (Revelations), Im Seong-jae (Emergency Declaration), and newcomer Han Ji-hyeon.

However, viewers expecting another horror spectacle from the Train to Busan filmmaker may find The Ugly to be a dramatic departure. The film operates much closer to a somber character study than a traditional genre thriller.

That said, for audiences who appreciate the humanistic themes Yeon occasionally explores beneath the chaos of his larger films, The Ugly offers a compelling and emotionally heavy experience.

It’s not a horror film in the conventional sense—but it may reveal something far more unsettling about the nature of cruelty.

Rating: 3 / 5