Yeon Sang-ho's microbudget gamble can't find its target

Reporters sat in a Seoul screening room Wednesday, looking at the theater's screen with six faces beaming in from Toronto. It was 3 a.m. there, but director Yeon Sang-ho and his cast looked wired, having just emerged from the world premiere of "The Ugly" at the Toronto International Film Festival, where all 1,721 seats had sold out.

"Park Jung-min is Toronto's Justin Bieber," Yeon joked about his lead actor's unexpected Canadian fan base. "The joy of watching these brilliant actors on a massive screen in that darkened space — it reminded me why cinema matters."

The unusual setup — necessitated by the cast's festival obligations — felt oddly fitting for "The Ugly," a film that dispensed with most conventional filmmaking grammar. Shot in three weeks with a skeleton crew of 20 and a budget of roughly $150,000, it was a radical departure from Yeon after previous Netflix spectacles like "Hellbound" and "Kingdom."

"I was inspired by legendary Asian films, most of them low-budget," Yeon said. "There's a specific energy that only comes from those constraints."

Yeon had initially considered shooting on phones, making the flashback sequences like reenactment TV. "Then I got scared it would look too shabby. But if you're so worried about saving face that you can't take risks, you'll spend your whole career just trying to look respectable. I could only try."

The film centers on Dong-hwan (Park Jung-min), whose blind seal carver father (Kwon Hae-hyo) is being profiled for a documentary when construction workers unearth his mother's remains — 40 years after she supposedly abandoned the family.

What follows is a series of interviews led by an opportunistic documentary producer (Han Ji-hyun). She drags Dong-hwan to meet those who knew his mother, each one eager to share their memories of the woman they nicknamed "dung ogre" for her supposedly hideous face.

Their nasty recollections upend everything Dong-hwan believed about his mother. She was not the virtuous, kind woman he had imagined — or was she? Each interview and flashback peels back another layer of 1970s Korea, when survival meant keeping your head down and taking whatever came your way.

"The question started with my own obsession with achievement," Yeon explained. "Where does that come from? That led to bigger questions about the days of Korea's rapid modernization — what we lost, who we took advantage of."

Park, who plays both the son and his younger father in flashbacks, connected with Yeon's political edge. "I love it when Yeon gets angry at society. That's when his best work comes out."

The film's chapter structure — "Interview 1," "Interview 2" and so on — suggests procedural rigor, but in fact delivers something far more basic. Each flashback replays what someone had already told the audience and adds little to forward momentum. Yeon lays out his reveals with such heavy-handed clarity that the mystery effectively becomes something of a scaffolding to prop up what he really wants to show: the everyday violence and oppression in Korea's drive to modernization.

The director does nail the atmosphere — that queasy discomfort that builds through encounters with senseless evil. Relatives trash the dead woman like she's nothing. Former co-workers mock her appearance with disturbing glee. And Park Jung-min's performance makes you feel every bit of it.

Playing the son, Park cycles through shame and rage with each fresh insult. As the younger, blind father, he captures both the vulnerability that comes with disability and how self-pity becomes its own kind of weapon. (Park mentioned his own father is legally blind, which adds another layer here.)

The trouble is not that Yeon reaches for too much; it is that he just cannot pick a target.

Yeon sets out to dissect the whole system that brutalized and destroyed this woman but seems to have only a dim sense of what that system actually was. Is he going after lookism? Workplace violence? Or more broadly, the rigid hierarchies of industrial labor that demand unquestioning submission? How ableist structures turn disability into moral failure?

In his broad-stroke attempt to implicate everyone all at once, these separate strands of violence blur together into some shallow caricature of a bygone era. Even the concept with the most promise — a blind artist fixated on visual beauty — dissolves into the same preachy muddle.

Had this been from an emerging indie filmmaker working within budgetary constraints, you would have to cut them some slack. But given Yeon's global stature and access to resources, every limitation represents a deliberate choice demanding rigorous evaluation. The decision to withhold the mother's face until the final frame ultimately epitomizes the film's fundamental lack: Where specificity should anchor the narrative, we find only emptiness.

"I've never been this desperate for box office success," Yeon said near the conference's end. "The break-even point is incredibly low, but everyone worked for so little. I want them to actually make money from this."

"The Ugly" opened in Korean theaters Thursday.