South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho, known for the disaster film Train to Busan, releases The Ugly in France on July 29, an intimate thriller adapted from his own graphic novel, shot in less than a month with a crew and budget much smaller than his previous productions.
A forty-year-old family secret
The film follows Im Dong-hwan, who is overseeing the filming of a documentary about his father, a master seal engraver blind from birth and admired for the exquisite detail of his work. The filming takes a dramatic turn when the police contact Dong-hwan to inform him that the remains of his mother, who disappeared forty years earlier and whom everyone believed to be gone, have just been discovered buried in a forest.
Dong-hwan then embarks on his own investigation into this family past carefully buried by his father, a quest for truth that gradually unveils secrets linked to what the film's synopsis describes as human ugliness.
A second French release in 2026 for the director
Starring Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, and Han Ji-hyun, the film marks Yeon Sang-ho's second release in French theaters this year, following Colony. Distributed in France by KMBO, The Ugly premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025 before its initial release in South Korea.
Unlike the big-budget genre productions that brought him international fame, Yeon Sang-ho returns here to a more modest style of filmmaking, in the thematic continuity of his very first feature films devoted to the excesses of contemporary Korean society.
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