Filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho is known for directing some of South Korea’s biggest commercial hits of screens large and small, such as the zombie blockbuster Train to Busan (a $140 million box-office smash), or breakthrough Netflix series like Hellbound and Parasyte: The Grey. But the director’s most recent feature, The Ugly, was made for a mere $160,000.
A miraculous feat of independent filmmaking amid Korea’s increasingly hyper-commercialized entertainment sector, the period thriller nonetheless has all of the gloss and production prowess of a midbudget studio feature. Yeon fully self-financed the film, which he also wrote, through his production outfit Wow Point, ensuring total creative control. He paid his small but distinguished cast — including stars and industry veterans Park Jeong-min (Uprising), Kwon Hae-hyo (Peninsula) and Shin Hyun-been (Revelations) — a modest day rate, while promising them a share of backend profits. Similar arrangements were made with the skeleton crew and award-winning department heads. Leading local studio Plus M Entertainment later boarded as distributor and international sales agent. Financial details remain undisclosed, but international presales moved briskly at film markets over the past year, suggesting Yeon and his collaborators have likely already made a tidy return.
The Ugly will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9, followed by commercial releases in South Korea on Sept. 11 and the U.S. on Sept. 26.
Korean media outlets have hailed The Ugly’s production approach as a potential creative solution to the skyrocketing actor fees and production costs that have plagued the local film industry in recent years, as swelling K-content slates at Netflix and Disney+ continue to drive up the cost of talent. Yeon has similarly urged fellow Korean creatives to experiment with financing and production structures.
A haunting thriller that weaves mystery with social critique, The Ugly follows Im Dong-hwan, a man who learns that the remains of his mother, Jung Young-hee — who vanished 40 years earlier — have been unearthed in a forest. Teaming with a TV journalist, he investigates her past as a garment factory worker in 1970s Seoul, only to find that her former colleagues recall her merely as an especially “ugly” woman they would rather forget. Dong-hwan also begins to suspect that his father, Yeong-gyu — a blind man who overcame his disability to raise him and become a master artisan — may be guarding secrets of his own. What begins as a family mystery gradually opens onto broader questions of social resentment, morality and the enduring trauma of history.
Ahead of this year’s Busan International Film Festival — where Plus M will be selling The Ugly at the Asian Contents & Film Market, and Showbox will be selling Yeon’s upcoming zombie thriller Colony — The Hollywood Reporter connected with Yeon via Zoom in Seoul to discuss the layered meanings of The Ugly and the bold microbudget experiment that brought it to life.
(Warning: Spoilers for The Ugly follow.)
I understand The Ugly is a project you’ve been working on and thinking about for a very long time. How did it begin?
I wrote the script around the time when I did The Fake (2013). I wanted to tell a story about generational differences. My father’s generation in Korea was focused so heavily on achievement and economic development. My generation came after that and everything was changed for us. The main character [in The Ugly], Im Yeong-gyoo, overcomes obstacles in a very dramatic way, and he’s almost a symbol for Korea’s modern development. As a counterpoint, I created the character Jung Young-hee to explore who and what was erased during this period of miraculous growth.
The camera avoids showing Young-hee’s face throughout the entire film until the very last shot, where you reveal a photo of her. But the face we see isn’t the actress TKTK who plays her. How did you come up with that image you use to represent her? I found it almost heartbreaking in its frank ordinariness.
I wanted a face that could be anybody’s but also nobody’s, representing that entire generation of Korean society. The final reveal is almost documentary-like, and I wanted it to extend the film’s world into our reality. Everyone will be naturally curious about just how “ugly” she is, but the experience of ugliness is a very subjective thing. Most importantly, she is a deeply just character, and her relentless sense of justice makes those around her very uncomfortable. I wanted to pose the question: Is it really her face that’s ugly, or the corruption of those who scorn her? To me, she symbolizes a kind of “discomforting justice.”
Shin Hyun-been as Jung Young-hee, the murdered and mistreated moral center of ‘The Ugly.’
Moral complexity is a hallmark of your work. How do you approach shaping the audience’s sympathies to create this multilayered aspect?
When I start imagining the world of a film, I approach it in a Socratic way, where I look for two opposing egos that can clash and question one another in an endless loop with no decisive answer. Finding themes where characters can continuously engage and undermine one another in this way, as a kind of contrasting ideal, is the most gratifying thing to me as a creator. My criteria for a great film is one that begins as soon as it finishes, because it starts a line of questioning in the audience’s mind that can’t be easily resolved.
Okay, here’s an overlong reading of the story’s allegory: The blind stamp carver, Im Yeong-gyoo, represents Korea in its rapid development era, as you said, after the country has suffered historical hardships and humiliations on the world stage. Like the blind father, the country is desperately trying to overcome its past and disadvantages, in pursuit of a more beautiful future — but that pursuit almost necessarily entails a brittle form of pride, which leads to various injustices along the way. Young-hee, meanwhile, represents pure moral conscience, which is unwelcome during the intensity of this competitive, fast-developing era. She stands for the vulnerable who are cast aside, erased from the narrative of the country’s self-overcoming. But the scars from that era are still very much present in society, and the son, Im Dong-hwan, represents the youth of today who are trying to come to terms with that generational complexity and its legacy. His father has largely been a good dad and he’s proud of him, but he’s also coming to terms with the truly terrible acts that were entailed in his father’s overcoming. Am I on the right track?
On the whole, that’s very close to my intention. I’ll point out a couple of other details that are important to grasping the code that’s embedded in the film. One is the character of the factory owner, Baek Ju-sang, who has a very dark, hidden side to him, but who is also considered a good boss and decent person by the people around him. In that time of incredible economic hardship, he was one of the rare few who never skipped paying his employees and kept the factory humming for everyone’s gain. The second detail is the cut that Young-hee leaves on her husband’s hand in the moment that he kills her. In the beginning of the film, Yeong-gyoo explains it away as an injury he got while perfecting his stamp carving artistry. The way he twists the story of this scar — which cannot be erased — is key to what I wanted to express.
You mentioned the project began with thinking about your father’s generation. Have you shown the film to your parents?
Not yet. My father isn’t well enough to watch my films, sadly, but I think my mother, who is from that same generation, will see it. I’m really curious to see what she’ll think.
Since the film is an allegory about South Korea, did it shift your thoughts about your country in any meaningful way?
Not really. I tweaked and smoothed a lot of things to make for a better film, but my core view and the central theme were all there in the original script. Something that did change was my view of the Korean film industry. Thanks to incredible works like Parasite and Squid Game, Korean content has made huge achievements on the world stage. But at the same time, I’ve begun to feel that the artistic quality and value of our films has started to be defined by their ranking on streaming platforms. It’s become all about quantitative appeal for global audiences. Ironically, this unspoken industry atmosphere reflects the same desperate growth-oriented era that The Ugly is all about. So I thought deeply about how I could evade that logic as I put The Ugly together. This was an incredible motivation for me with this movie.
Yeon Sang-ho on the set of ‘Peninsula,’ his big-budget sequel to ‘Train to Busan’
Courtesy of Contents Panda
I’ve read about the film’s very low budget, small creative team and the tight shooting schedule. You also were able to recruit high-profile actors who were willing to forgo up-front payment for potential backend. Why did you set the film up this way?
Two reasons. First, my daughter, like many young people, watches a lot of YouTube — it’s almost the only thing she watches. So I end up watching a lot of YouTube content with her, and this made me start to question the way I make films. Because when you think about it, the online content that is really competing with film for attention is often incredibly compelling and entertaining in its own right, and it requires very little up-front budget to create. As a film buff, I also realized that a lot of the films I most love — by legendary Asian masters like Edward Yang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and others — were made for very little money. So, these two factors in combination got me thinking that I should try doing something on a much smaller budget.
Do you feel the experiment was successful for you — both artistically and as a business model?
The cast and crew were all people I’ve been working with for a very long time. There was no external funding, so the creation of this film was essentially a group of friends clustered around the script, having intense artistic conversations, and nothing else existed outside that circle. So I just hope the end result — both commercially and creatively — is as satisfying for everyone as the process of making it.
Would you work this way again?
Absolutely. Most of my work will still be within the larger Korean system, but I definitely want to continue making smaller films like this. I hope investors and distributors become more open to supporting such projects, and I urge other artists explore new approaches, too. Different mediums — digital versus theatrical — have different speeds of delivering story and information. YouTube and streaming need to be fast and instantly stimulating, while film is slower and more immersive. The Ugly, for example, is a drama thriller that’s not really about finding the culprit behind the murder — it’s pretty obvious from the start. It’s about slowly exploring the twisted inner lives of these characters and what they represent — and that requires a theatrical experience. I don’t think cinema is dying — but we need to be open to transformation. I look forward to seeing what emerges.