This is a weird-looking movie. The directorial debut of South Korean animator Kyung-hun Cho and his Studio Animal, it really says something when the most bizarre aspect of this whole production is how inconsistent the animation is. Not that it’s even that bad (far from it, it works really damn well); just that it uses a combination of traditional 2D line-drawn animation and 3D cell-shaded animation and… I think the 3D is devoted solely to the main-ish characters (basically whoever affects the plot in a substantial way), but going back and forth between the two styles is quite jarring. Ditto for the moments when the 2D work steps into budget-cut territory and suddenly gets extremely choppy and chicken-scratchy for a few frames.
However, I’d still argue that that effect is at once suited to the larger story and something of an achievement that it managed to overshadow what is, in essence, a very dark and unsettling bit of psycho-thrill with copious showings of body horror. But not to the point where said dark and unsettling elements don’t have an impact, as the story of the overweight Yaeji and her attempts to become beautiful through the titular beauty treatment is quite effective. With the story focusing largely on her character and her wracked psychology, she serves as a sturdy anchor for the script’s bigger musings about beauty, vanity, and just how far some will go for the superficial. It’s like Dumplings, only the cannibalism is slightly less literal and aged up a fair bit.
There’s a lot of Satoshi Kon energy to this, both in how uncompromising the commentary is as well as in the character designs. Rather than going for the standard Eastern animation/anime look, which is a lot more informed by romanticised forms in Western animation than anything local, the characters actually look like they fit in a story set in South Korea. Almost to a parodic degree, since love interest Jihoon looks like he’s auditioning for BTS, but it adds to the grounding that keeps the frequent steps into Cronenbergian nightmare territory tangibly realistic. And for a story so entrenched in body dysmorphia, something that reaches a morbid peak by film’s end, that approach mostly works.
I say ‘mostly’ because the story gets increasingly off-the-rails the further it goes on. It feels like the filmmakers had a good idea of what they wanted to talk about, but at 85 minutes, they tried too hard to squeeze all of it into the run time. Self-image problems, mental illness, influencer narcissism, the entertainment industry, the beauty industry, mistreatment of women in both, outer beauty vs. inner beauty; it runs somewhere between Kon’s Perfect Blue, Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty, and Cronenberg doing a film version of Franken Fran, a balancing act that would be a little too much to take if the film’s pacing wasn’t remarkably taut; it may feel like stacked buckets of crazy, but they’re all being poured in a single direction.
It’s a chaotic and wild ride, one where the sheer genre weirdness on display can swing from unnerving to perplexing to schadenfreude at breakneck speeds, but that just adds to the fun of it all for me. It’s got a great pedigree for gore and horrific imagery, balanced out well-enough by solid characterisation and voice acting (no matter how bizarre her actions get, Moon Man-Sook’s delivery always kept me invested in what happened to Yaeji), and its artistic reference points are not only things I am (mostly) fond of, but things I wasn’t expecting to see brought together in such gripping fashion this year or really any year.
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