The Ugly

Yeon Sang-ho adapted this from Face, his own graphic novel of 2018. Park Jeong-min plays two roles: the younger Im Yeong-gyu, a blind master of seal engraving, and his son Im Dong-hwan. Kwon Hae-hyo plays the father in the present. Dong-hwan has taken over his father's workshop and persuades him to become the subject of a documentary about a craftsman who reached mastery in spite of his disability. When the journalist played by Shin Hyun-been starts filming, she turns up the trail of the mother who disappeared forty years earlier, and the documentary's heroic story becomes something else. The film's actual subject is how much weight the story a family tells about itself can bear. Yeon Sang-ho sets genre aside here for a slow, verbal, cold construction, a quieter piece of work than anyone would expect from the director known for zombie films. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean mystery drama and films about silence inside families. Who it is not for: anyone expecting pace from Yeon Sang-ho, or wanting a clear resolution.