The Beauty Inside

Male Lead: Park Seo Jun
Female Lead: Han Hyo Joo
Also Starring: Do Ji Han, Kim Dae Myung, Bae Sung Woo, Chun Young Woon, Park Shin Hye
Year Released: 2015
Genre: Contemporary, Fantasy
Country: Korea
Where I Watched It: Viki
Who I Watched It For: Park Seo Jun

This is a different kind of identity crisis.

Woo Jin is a young man who works as a furniture designer. He has a great life with the woman he loves, Yi Soo (Han Hyo Joo), if it weren’t for one little problem.

Every morning, Woo Jin wakes up to discover that he is inhabiting a different body. It could be the body of a young, good-looking man (Do Ji Han), a portly everyman (Kim Dae Myung), a middle-aged man (Bae Sung Woo), an old man (Chun Young Woon) or even a beautiful young woman (Park Shin Hye)!

Every time Woo Jin wakes up in a new body, he has to figure out where he is and how he can find his way back to Yi Soo, who is always waiting for him. Will there be a day that Woo Jin can’t find his way back?

“The Beauty Inside” is a 2015 South Korean film directed by Baik. It is based on the 2012 American social film by the same title directed by Drake Doremus.

In making my way through Park Seo Jun’s work, I came across this movie. It’s an interesting premise for a story and Park Seo Jun is in it for more than five minutes so that was already a win for me. Ha!

So this movie is about a man named Woo Jin who wakes up every morning in a different body. His emotions and everything inside of him is still Woo Jin but his outside changes every time he wakes up in the morning. Sometimes he’s a handsome young man but sometimes he wakes up as a portly old man or a grandmotherly type old woman. In the beginning, you can tell that he is struggling with waking up as a not so gorgeous person. He’s kind of vain and the disappointment he has every morning when he wakes up in an ugly person’s body had me side eying him. He enjoys the days that he wakes up in a beautiful body and even capitalizes on it by hooking up with girls he meets at the club or the bar. He leads completely different lives every single day with the new faces and bodies but the one thing that stays the same is his crush on the saleswoman at the furniture store that he goes to.

Woo Jin makes furniture for a living and he spends time in a furniture store, in all of the different faces and bodies that he wakes up with. He lives a very complicated life, a life that keeps him away from people and because of that, he’s very lonely. The only people that know about his condition are his best friend and his mother. His best friend comes off as bubbly and low key pervy but as the movie progresses, you see that he’s still all of those things but he does care and support Woo Jin.

The theme of the movie centers around the beauty inside of a person. No matter what body and face Woo Jin woke up with, on the inside, where it counts, he was still just Woo Jin. When we first meet him, he’s struggling because a part of him is vain and pissed off that he’s not normal and that causes him to do something pretty extreme. When he wakes up in Park Seo Jun’s body, he thinks that this is his shot. He’s going to approach the furniture store girl and he’s never going to sleep again…and it works, he pursues the furniture store girl and hooks her with his good looks then wins her over with his personality and all of that goes up in flames when he falls asleep because the minute he wakes up, he’s in a different body and Park Seo Jun is gone so he does what we all expected him to do. He runs.

Han Hyo Joo did a great job in portraying the character Yi Soo in this movie. I was really invested in her journey. From her first meeting Woo Jin with Park Seo Jun’s face and body, to her falling in love with him in a matter of days and then going through being abandoned by him, learning the truth about him and then accepting him and trying to figure out how to be with him. It wasn’t an easy journey but seeing both of them struggle with their different issues was interesting and I really connected with both of their characters, with the whole movie in general. The pacing in the beginning of the movie was a little slow but once things picked up, they really picked up and I ended up really enjoying the movie and the message. I cried a lot but my heart grew and grew with every minute that I watched this so I would definitely recommend this one. It’s good.

Final Rating

4.25 out of 5