(Gigigoegoe Seonghyeongsu)
South Korea. 2020.
Crew
Director – Cho Kyung-hun, Screenplay – Hanbin Lee, Producer – Jeon Byung-jin, Music – Hongdaeseong. Production Company – Studio Animal/Ningxia Film Group.
Beauty Water (2020)
Rating: ★★★
Plot
The overweight Sul-hye works as an assistant to the beautiful Mi-ri, the star of a series of beauty product infomercials, but Mi-ri treats her as disgusting. Sul-hye is surprised when the handsome actor Hi-joon pays attention to her and tells her that her eyes are beautiful. Sul-hye is asked to stand in as an extra on the set during a shoot, only for her appearance to be ridiculed on the internet after the show airs. A mystery woman reaches out to Sul-hye by email, offering her the miraculous Beauty Water with which one is able to reshape their skin. The woman demands a US $100,000 payment for the full treatment. Sul-hye begs the money of her parents and takes the treatment to emerge looking stunning. However, Sul-hye accidentally goes to sleep in a bath of Beauty Water when her phone runs out of power and her alarm fails to wake her. Her parents come in to find Sul-hye a hideous mass but still alive. They try to piece her back together using their own flesh. Lacking the funds to pay for a new treatment to fix this, Sul-hye’s mind snaps.
Anime that comes from South Korea is a much rarer body of work than content made from Japan. Indeed, there is even a debate as to whether it can be classified as anime if it comes from Korea rather than Japan. Personally, I don’t see why it cannot be as it very much employs the same artistic style as Japanese anime does. Certainly, there have been some worthwhile Korean examples including My Beautiful Girl, Mari (2002), Aachi & Sspiak (2006), On the White Planet (2014) , The Satellite Girl and Milk Cow (2014) and Seoul Station (2016), among others.
Beauty Water is a horror anime that digs its teeth into the beauty and image obsession that apparently dominates South Korean media. The film makes an immediate contrast between the overweight Sul-hye and the bitchy but perfect-looking Mi-ri, before spinning everything on its head and having Sul-ye get use of the title pharmaceutical that appears to have an ability to restructure body fat. It becomes clear that what we have is the fantasy/horror trope of The Transformation That Comes With a Price as we see the cost of achieving this being it eating up all Sul-hye’s parents’ savings and then their flesh too. There is a horribleness when it comes to the inevitable point where things go wrong and Sul-hye emerges after going to sleep in the bath, followed by her parents’ efforts to put her back together with their own flesh, resulting in something that looks like a Frankenstein-ian patchwork creation.
If Beauty Water had ended around that point, it would have been a perfect episode of a horror Anthology series. Not so much The Twilight Zone (1959-63) but more one of the modern equivalents like Masters of Horror (2005-7) or Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022- ) that place much more of an emphasis on makeup grotesqueries. It works well in the sense of providing a typical protagonist of an anthology story – someone who wants more for their life and receives it only to realise too late that it has a terrible price leading to a horribly grotesque fate at the ending.
However, Beauty Water doesn’t end there and seems to go on where Sul-hye regains her beauty and then connects with Hi-joon, the guy of her dreams, and romance appears to be in the offing. Just when you start to think the film has forgotten all about the horror it had established up to the point and turned into a romantic film, this becomes a lead-in for the film to arrive at an extremely nasty ending.
Trailer here