The Ugly 2025

Im Yeong-gyu is a blind seal-engraving master celebrated nationwide as a “living miracle” for creating exquisitely beautiful work, and he runs his workshop with his son, Im Dong-hwan. A television documentary profiles Yeong-gyu’s life and artistry, and through that intimate lens, the son discovers a truth long buried: his mother, Jung Young-hee, who many believed had abandoned the family, was actually dead. Her skeletal remains are unearthed at a construction site, buried for nearly forty years, reopening a past that had been suppressed and forgotten and inviting painful questions about what was left unsaid.

Kim Su-jin, the documentary’s director, Shin Hyun-been, becomes deeply involved in tracing Young-hee’s final days. Together with Dong-hwan, she pieces together fragments of testimony from former coworkers, relatives, and the factory owner Baek Ju-sang, gradually revealing a harsh world shaped by silence, poverty, and indignity. The story that emerges is not only about one woman’s suffering but about a structural cruelty that allowed abuse to persist behind closed doors.

Young-hee endured relentless abuse because of how she looked, yet she refused to stay quiet. She defended other women against sexual violence, confronted powerful men, and paid for her courage with her own livelihood and safety. The investigation leads them to Baek Ju-sang, now an invalid, whom they persuade to share his side of the story, even as any prosecution remains blocked by the statute of limitations. In parallel, they learn more about Yeong-gyu: an ambitious, penniless craftsman who sought greatness through his art but who allowed society’s cruelties to mold his worldview, choosing to hide his true feelings rather than disrupt the world around him.

Yeong-gyu came to believe that Young-hee had taken advantage of his blindness, and his humiliation deepened when he felt she threatened his fragile social connections and status as the family’s breadwinner. The film reveals a dangerous dynamic in which his love and his resentment collide, sparing no one from the consequences of a society that measures worth by appearances. The truth erupts when Baek Ju-sang’s men reveal that Young-hee had already been murdered by Yeong-gyu, and that her body was later buried by Baek’s people after Yeong-gyu abandoned it.

Dong-hwan ultimately confronts his father, and Yeong-gyu confesses that the killing happened in a moment of drunken rage and humiliation. Faced with this confession, Dong-hwan must decide whether to uphold the myth of his father as a national miracle or to acknowledge the darker truth. He chooses the former, a choice that unsettles Kim Su-jin, who recognizes in him a parallels to his father’s instinct to protect social standing. She shares a photo of Young-hee from Baek Ju-sang’s collection, illustrating how society’s rigid definitions of ugliness and virtue distort truth, and how silence—mistaken for survival—can become a generational violence that passes from one generation to the next.