“Beautiful” centers around the stunning Eun-young Kim (Su-yeon Cha). Unfortunately for Eun-young, her beauty becomes more of a curse rather than a blessing. She finds it difficult to make friends, frequently misunderstood and often finds herself wanting to be just left alone. Her world quickly comes tumbling down when a stalker breaks into her apartment and rapes her.

After this traumatic incident, Eun-young attempts various ways to rid herself of her beauty. She first tries to binge eat herself into obesity and when that doesn’t work, she tries to starve herself into an unattractive figure. During this time a police officer (Cheon-hee Lee) finds himself falling for the still beautiful Eun-young Kim. Eventually the police officer finds himself stalking Eun-young in the same manner as Eun-young’s rapist.

The topic of “beauty” isn’t something new in the Ki-duk Kim world. Kim’s 2006 film “Time” dealt with similar subject matter but from a slightly different angle. Problems that arise with “Beautiful” are the same qualities that have marred Kim’s work in the past.

In “Beautiful” all the characters reside in a artificial world of extremes. Similar to some of Ki-duk Kim’s past films, the characters in “Beautiful” never come across as living-breathing people, but rather symbolic figures to express the director’s ideas. As an example all the male characters in the movie are cardboard thin characters, obsessed only with Eun-young Kim’s beauty. Eventually, this world of extremes causes the movie goer to view the characters as shallow artistic symbols rather than real characters. This then leads to the uncomfortable feeling of being spoon fed one man’s artistic vision.

The story itself causes plenty of alarms. Similar to early Ki-duk Kim films, there’s a heavy misogynist feel to “Beautiful.” Police officers sympathizes with rapists, women in general are viewed only as objects, and there’s that deprave sexual act shown in the final sequence for no meaningful reason. There’s also this oppressive feeling of someone wanting something unobtainable and then becoming engulfed with rage that permeates throughout the movie. Enough so that I wondered how often this happened in Ki-duk Kim’s past.

“Beautiful” did have some moments where it showed promise. Su-yeon Cha won’t make you forget Do-yeon Jeon anytime soon, but her performance still makes you want to see more of her. Unfortunately for the movie, the heavy misogynist feel of “Beautiful” felt suffocating to this viewer and the always extreme actions by all the characters screamed out “wannabe art film!”