THE BEAUTY INSIDE (2015)

Genre: Romance/Comedy
Director: BAIK
Cast: Han Hyo-joo, Kim Dae-myeung, Do Ji-han, Bae Seong-woo, Park Shin-hye, Lee Bum-soo, Park Seo-jun, Kim Sang-ho, Chun Woo-hee, Ueno Juri, Lee Jae-joon, Kim Min-jae, Lee Hyun-woo, Cho Dal-hwan, Lee Jin-uk, Hong Da-mi, Seo Kang-jun, Kim Hie-won, Lee Dong-wook, Ko Asung, Kim Joo-hyuk, Yoo Yeon-seok
Runtime: 2 hrs 6 mins
Rating: PG13 (Some Sexual References)
Released By: Golden Village Pictures
Official Website:

Opening Day: 17 December 2015

Synopsis: Woo-jin changes every day: into a man, a woman, a child, an old man ... and even a foreigner. And one day, when he visits his regular furniture store, Woo-jin finds E-soo and falls for her at the very first sight. And when D-day comes, he decides to confess to her. "What do you prefer? Sushi or steak?" "I ... practiced this many times." Are you able to love someone who changes every day? .

Movie Review:

Don’t we always wonder whether the people who say that they love us do so for how we look on the outside or who we are on the inside, and hope that it is the latter, given how looks are ultimately ephemeral? That’s the dilemma at the heart of commercials director Baik’s feature filmmaking debut, ‘The Beauty Inside’, which imagines a man who wakes up as a different person each day – an old woman, a middle-aged man, a young lady, a child, an Asian, a Caucasian etc. It isn’t a new idea; the same conceit was first part of a series of Youtube shorts by Drake Doremus, but Baik has used that high-concept to explore just how a person with such a condition would be able to hold a normal relationship with a woman and in doing so stretch the limits of inner beauty to its extreme.

In voiceover, our lead protagonist Kim Woo-jin enlightens us about his identity crisis that he has been coping with since he turned eighteen nearly 12 years ago. Only two people are aware of his unique circumstance – his mother and his best friend, Sang-beck (Lee Dong-hwi) – and as you may guess, they are also the only two people whom Woo-jin keeps enduring relationships with. A designer and woodworker, Woo-jin prefers retreating to the comfort of his studio away from the glare of the public eye, relying on Sang-beck to supply him with the raw materials he needs for his work and to sell his handcrafted furniture via their private-limited company. Though he humours Sang-beck by going to bars to look for one-night stands with him, Woo-jin has his eye really on a certain salesgirl Yi-soo (Han Hyo-joo) in an avant-garde furniture store, whom he visits in a different “shell” regularly.

And then one day, Woo-jin decides to ask Yi-soo out for a dinner date, thus beginning a three-day marathon of staying awake in order that he may get to meet her in the form of Park Seo-jun. Eventually though, he drifts off on the subway and wakes up as a middle-aged man, and despite turning up the next morning at the bus stop where they have arranged to meet, he doesn’t approach Yi-soo for fear of startling her. It will be months later that the lovelorn Woo-jin finally decides to reveal himself to Yi-soo, which happens to be in the form of a young woman who first identifies herself as a company intern. Despite being shocked at first, Yi-soo’s love for Woo-jin convinces her to persevere in a completely unconventional relationship that comes with a few rather predictable ramifications.

Besides the fact that she cannot recognise him at first sight on any given day, Yi-soo is also faced with doubts from her older sister as well as her boss why she seems to be seeing a different man every night. Of course, their relationship is not without its charms – in one particular iteration where Woo-jin appears as a young boy, Yi-soo slips Woo-jin alcohol in a Yakult bottle at the restaurant where they are having dinner when the servers are not looking; and in another, Woo-jin turns up as the dashing Lee Beom-soo at a corporate party after being an elderly woman just two hours ago, much to Yi-soo and her boss’ pleasant surprise. There are equal bits tense and heart-wrenching moments between Woo-jin and Yi-soo as there are sweet and tender ones, but as narrative convention dictates, there will be a heated, tearful argument before the pair finally reconcile – and in beautiful Prague, no less.

As much as the concept lends itself to broad comedy or social commentary, Baik and his co-writers K. Ganggeul and Park Jung-ye are not interested in either; rather, they eschew thought-provoking subjects like gender or racial identity in favour of a simple and straightforward romance that probes just how far true love can be divorced from a person’s physical appearance. Yet it is also because it is so singularly devoted to this theme that their film ends up being slight and even shallow – indeed, it glosses over how Yi-soo would relate to someone who looks the same sex as her, or speak a different language as her, or is of a different race, or of a different skin colour. Such nuances are unfortunately lost in a film that is otherwise keen to be as pleasing and inoffensive as it can be, and no more than a romance in the strictest sense of the word.

Without such ambition, ‘The Beauty Inside’ ends up being – for the lack of a better word – skin-deep. In the most significant scenes, Woo-jin is played by no fewer than 21 actors, including Do Ji-han, Lee Jae-joon, Lee Jin-wook, Seo Kang-jun, Lee Dong-wook, Kim Hee-won and Yoo Yeon-seok; and if you count every single representation of him, there are a total of 123 distinct actors. There is some fun watching Woo-jin switch from identity to identity, and die-hard romantics will lap up the sentimental scenes of Woo-jin and Yi-soo sharing couple time together, but those are pretty much the only pleasures that you’ll get in a very deliberately paced soft-focus romance that is pretty to look at on the outside but lacking in depth on the inside. 

Movie Rating:

(An intriguing premise gets a very straightforward and rather bland execution in 'The Beauty Inside', whose pleasures are ironically, skin-deep)

Review by Gabriel Chong