The new film by Yeon Sang-ho, best known for Train to Busan (2016), broke multiple records while raising more existential questions about filmmaking under the current conditions of the Korean cinema industry. Produced for under 220,000 US dollars—a fraction of the budget of Yeon’s previous commercial works and even below what is commonly considered the scale of independent film production—the film reportedly recouped more than thirty-five times its investment upon its release in autumn 2025. The crew numbered around twenty, the shoot was completed in three weeks, and the main actors participated under back-end compensation agreements. The result is one of the most striking films in recent years: modest in scale yet peculiar in its thematic concerns, and at the same time expansive in its ethical interrogation of beauty and social manipulation in the age of social media.
The Korean film industry has been searching for explanations for the continuing decline in cinema attendance, a downturn that has led to shrinking revenues and triggered a vicious cycle of reduced investment, fewer productions, and further audience loss. Some locate the beginning of this downturn in the COVID-19 pandemic, during which social distancing and lockdowns severely disrupted habitual cinema-going. Others point to the rise of digital streaming platforms such as Netflix as the primary force behind declining theatrical enthusiasm. Statistics suggest that total cinema attendance has fallen to around one hundred million—roughly half of the 2018 figure—while the share of audiences watching Korean films has dropped from 50.9 percent to 41 percent. In this context, the language of crisis is hardly an exaggeration.
Yeon’s decision to make a film on a near shoestring budget can be read as a determination to continue filmmaking in an industry that has grown increasingly reluctant to invest in projects lacking a clear promise of commercial return—often at the cost of narrative repetition and safe appeal. Returning to his own 2018 webtoon of the same title, Yeon tells the story of a blind seal engraver, revered as a national treasure for his mastery of calligraphy used in stamps, a cultural equivalent of signatures in the West. The film opens with a television interview in which the engraver explains that he learned the beauty of letters by tracing inscriptions on tombstones across the country. From the outset, the film establishes an intimate link between beauty and the senses: whether tactile or visual, beauty emerges from a bodily capacity to evaluate it. From there, Yeon constructs an intricate play of seeing and not seeing, certainty and uncertainty, and their effects on personality, self-esteem, and even the scale of the ego itself.
Had the boom of the 2010s continued, Yeon might have pursued another spectacle-driven project comparable to Train to Busan or Psychokinesis. Instead, responding to an environment in which declining viewership has made studios hesitant to support bold theatrical productions—and in which global streaming platforms have diversified genres and narrative forms—he turns toward a mode of filmmaking that is quieter, more personal, yet deliberately cinematic. Idealistic, even romantic as it may sound, this gesture resembles a small rebellion, faintly echoing the ethos of the Dogme movement of the 1990s with its embrace of austerity and resistance to industrial spectacle.
Austerity and Creativity
In an interview with Cine21, Yeon cited Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997) as a key inspiration. Shot in just two weeks, Cure reportedly generated doubts even among its own crew, particularly regarding the hospital scene staged in a bare warehouse furnished with only two chairs. The crew questioned the plausibility of such a setting, yet the film’s core premise—the repetition of identical murders committed by multiple perpetrators—already operates beyond conventional realism. Plausibility, in this sense, becomes secondary to the film’s atmospheric and conceptual logic.
Another source of inspiration was Yoichi Sai’s Blood and Bones (2005), known in Korea under the director’s Korean name, Choi Yang-il. The film portrays a Korean man living in postwar Japan who builds a fish-cake business amid poverty and anti-Korean discrimination, sustaining it through violence and deeply distorted notions of masculinity and familial authority. Rather than reconstructing the postwar era through meticulous historical detail, Blood and Bones evokes it through a figure caught between cultures and identities, still shaped by the lingering structures of colonial discrimination. Its sparse settings—undressed streets, homes, and interiors—invite imagination to fill the gaps left by what is not shown.
The Ugly unfolds through the perspective of a blind man. When human bones are discovered at a construction site and identified by the police as likely belonging to his wife, who disappeared forty years earlier, the film foregrounds a destabilizing premise: what one sees is not always true, and what remains unseen is not necessarily without value. Vision, the film suggests, is already conditioned by forces beyond sensory perception—by abstract thinking, belief, and conceptual frameworks that shape interpretation. These non-sensory elements also influence what fails to appear visually. In this sense, the blind engraver is capable of grasping realities inaccessible to sight, however partial and uncertain those realities may be.
As the narrative progresses, the film shifts into an investigative mode, led by a television producer and the engraver’s son, who attempt to resolve the gap between the engraver’s claim that his wife disappeared and the police suspicion that she was murdered. Their inquiry focuses on reconstructing a woman who exists only as absence. Nothing about her is sensorially accessible: there are no photographs, no direct records. Those who remember her recall only that she was “ugly.” Through words, rumors, gossip, and fragmentary memories, the producer and the son assemble a speculative version of her life and death, gradually converging on a truth concealed by the engraver himself.
Paradoxically, although he could not see, the engraver holds the key to what truly happened, precisely because he possesses the capacity to construct reality from elements that are not physical. The Ugly thus becomes a powerful study of the relationship between seeing and believing, and of how belief shapes reality itself. What one believes one sees ultimately governs how the world is conceived, ordered, and judged.
Beauty in the Age of Social Media
The wife who disappeared—or was murdered—forty years earlier remains faceless throughout the film, except for a brief moment at the very end. Ironically, this visual anonymity secures her position as the pivotal figure around which ethical and unethical perceptions of beauty diverge. Two competing attitudes toward beauty emerge in relation to her. One locates beauty in outward appearance and treats it as a measure that determines personal virtue. The other understands beauty as originating from less visible sources, such as personality or character. Those who remember how she looked fail to see her as a person at all, while the television producer and the son construct an image of who she might have been beyond appearance.
For the viewer, this produces a dilemma: whether to trust those who “knew” her or those who attempt to imagine her otherwise. Aligning her with goodness promises narrative resolution and moral victory; relegating her to the opposite side completes the investigation with equal efficiency. Yet the wife’s persistent facelessness intensifies this uncertainty. It remains unclear whether the judgment that degrades her as “ugly” is groundless, just as it is uncertain whether the producer’s investigation arrives at any stable truth. In this sense, The Ugly offers a precise cinematic engagement with the conditions under which beauty operates today.
Beauty functions as a powerful currency on the stages of social media. Attractive faces, food, places, art, and fashion accumulate views and clicks, which are readily converted into commercial value. Judgments, however, are often formed and circulated in the absence of substantive knowledge about what is being seen. Beauty amplifies what is already visible, but more crucially, it sustains its authority through repetition and circulation, as if its legitimacy were guaranteed by majority consensus. As this logic intensifies, beauty’s position becomes increasingly dictatorial. At the same time, sustained reflection on what beauty is and what it does to us grows ever rarer. Yeon’s decision to return to this unfashionable question, under the harsh conditions of the contemporary Korean film industry, may itself be a response to crisis—a moment that forces a reckoning with forms of thinking long postponed.