"They won't leave me alone until I've done it, and each time they make it harder, and harder, and harder not to.”
One of my favorite things is when I can recommend a movie that even many of the hardcore horror fans haven't seen, and THE UGLY is one of the ones I suggest most often to fans who say they've seen everything. I absolutely love this movie. It's a little New Zealand indie produced by Peter Jackson and it's one of my all-time favorites.
Simon Cartwright is a serial killer in a psychiatric hospital telling his story to his new doctor, Karen, who empathizes with him but tries her best to get him to take accountability for what he's done instead of blaming it on The Ugly, ghosts he sees and voices he hears that he insists drove him to commit the crimes. For such a small indie, THE UGLY is a masterclass in editing. A lot of movies intercut between different time periods to look cool, unique or trendy, but this one does it to show trauma and even guilt as things that can freeze or shatter time.
Everything horrible that happened to you can feel like it's still happening, every terrible thing you've done can feel like a thing you're still doing. Simon will look in the mirror and still see himself with a scar on his face from childhood, long since healed. The Ugly appear as the ghosts of people he's killed, but he's seen them since childhood, and that's the morbid poetry at the heart of THE UGLY: its depiction of a convicted man being haunted by the things he has done, and a doomed boy being haunted by the things he is going to do.