Guilt is a Cycle, Hate is a Ghost, and Time is a Killer in ‘The Ugly’
Films like The Ugly are why I wanted to write about horror movies in the first place. So many spaces exist now for horror fans to communicate either online, at conventions, or even at a few particular spots here in the Orlando area. Naturally, it can be hard to recommend something people haven’t seen when you’re conversing with the dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong, jaded fans. But The Ugly is one of the few movies that, every time I bring it up, whether it’s on social media or in person, most people have never seen it. In fact, most people have never heard of it. That’s rewarding in the sense that I get the opportunity to help people seek it out, but tragic in that it is truly one of the best horror movies of its decade.
The Ugly starts off feeling like a low-budget, New Zealand version of Silence of the Lambs before moving in a completely different direction. The story expands in a nonlinear way and toes the line between gritty realism and abject surrealism impossibly well for its entire runtime. Simon Cartwright is a serial killer in a run-down, abusive mental health facility. He meets with a new psychiatrist, a young woman who believes Simon to be a career-making case.
As they meet, Simon begins to tell her about his abused childhood, about his domineering mother who told Simon that his father had run off and abandoned them, who won’t even allow him to learn to read because if he learned to read, he would discover his father’s repeated letters demanding to see his son. He had one friend, a girl, Julie, who his mother forbade him from seeing because of her overwhelming need to be the one and only thing in his entire life. His story reads like the biography of a textbook serial killer, except that Simon mentions that he was driven to commit his crimes by outside sources, by ghosts that only he can see, pale figures with black blood dripping from their open mouths and throats. Ghosts that Simon calls “the ugly.”
If this had simply been the indie, New Zealand answer to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, that would be an interesting film in its own right. That would still probably be a movie worth seeing. But The Ugly does something much more fascinating and powerful than had it “just” been a serial killer film. This is a study of a doomed person. This is an inward facing examination of a trapped life, and of a person who feels immense guilt over what he does but genuinely believes there is no circumstance in which he could ever have done anything else. And whether he’s right about that or not, and I’d hope that he isn’t, the point is that the more of his life we see, the more we’re inclined to believe him.
As a boy, Simon was ridiculed for being unable to read and for having no friends, but his mother kept him from learning to read, and his mother kept him away from all other children, so that he would never have friends. She orchestrated every aspect of his life so that he would never have anyone but her, but is then so ashamed of her need for him and dependency on his affection (and perhaps even ashamed of what she’s done) that she constantly tells him that he’s a horrible burden on her life.
The reason she won’t let him learn to read is that he receives letters from his father that she says are telling Simon how much he hates him, and how he’s gone off and got a much better new life, when of course the letters are actually sent in hopes of getting Simon out of that house and bringing the boy to stay with him, to give him a better life.
Simon befriends Julie, who genuinely loves him and tells him the truth about the letters, and his mother makes sure he’ll never see that girl again. She will not let anything good happen to her child, ever. She will not let him be anything but doomed, under any circumstances. Because if he is, if there’s any possibility that he could have some choice, some control, and make something of himself after his parents divorce, then that would have to mean that she could too, and that she simply chose not to do it. That is a reality she will never accept, and so she sacrifices Simon’s entire life to shield herself from it.
As an adult, already having been captured as a serial killer, Simon is regularly abused by the staff at the psychiatric facility. They don’t even hide their behavior from Simon’s new doctor, Karen, not really. Even she’s not strictly in it for Simon’s sake because she’s gaining a reputation in her field and clearly hoping to make a career on him. Even she dismisses the sob story a bit, but the lie Simon tells her is not that he was driven to it. He tells her the facts of his life and he doesn’t make up excuses but the lie that he tells her is that he enjoys it, that he just does it because he gets off on it, that he sees absolutely no value in human life. His lie is the thing most other killers can’t admit about themselves and she picks up on that. It fascinates Karen, because if that’s the fabrication he’s trying to sell her, what on earth is he hiding about why he really did it?
Simon is very much a subjective narrator. We often see the world as he sees it, and we fade into flashbacks when he’s struck by the memory, sometimes blending the past and present together. That is ultimately what The Ugly is about. Everything he felt, he’s still feeling. He’s haunted by the things he’s done as if he’s still acting them out and he feels the same about the things he’s yet to do. This is abundantly clear with the revelation of who the ugly, these ghosts he has seen since childhood, actually are. They’re his victims.
These ghosts have always been there, whispering in his ear, never quieting until he takes another life. As an adult, Simon is haunted by the ghosts of the things he has done. As a boy, he is haunted by the ghosts of the things he is going to do. It is a film about a doomed life. It is a meditation on evil that calls into question if evil even exists. It goes to far less extremes than movies like Henry or Deranged or Maniac and yet it is equally as tough a watch solely because of the way it feels.
I think The Ugly is a masterpiece. It might be my favorite serial killer narrative/psychological thriller/whatever you want to call it ever made. It is profoundly affecting. I want to see a deluxe physical media release that pulls out all the stops, I want to see it on streaming, solely because I want anything that might put this back in front of people’s eyes. Many of the movies I’ve covered here were films that gained an audience over time. The Ugly still hasn’t, at least not enough. I’m not even sure it’s fully earned the status of “cult classic,” let alone plain and simple “classic.” But it deeply deserves it. Hopefully, in the long run, time will be kinder to Simon than it ever has been to date.
