Please Make Me Look Pretty—A marketplace artist who redraws the meaning of beauty
Introduction
I didn’t expect a documentary to make me hold my breath every time a stranger sat down to be seen. Yet that’s exactly what happened as I watched Jung Eun-hye lift her pen and meet each person’s eyes like an old friend. Have you ever felt the hush right before someone really looks at you—without judgment, without hurry? That hush fills this film, and it’s as tender as it is brave. I found myself rooting not just for Eun-hye’s drawings, but for the quiet revolution she leads with a smile and the words, “But you’re already pretty.” By the end, I wasn’t just a viewer; I felt like one of the many faces she had invited into her world.
Overview
Title: Please Make Me Look Pretty (니얼굴)
Year: 2022 (world premiere: 2020 Busan International Film Festival)
Genre: Documentary
Main Cast: Jung Eun-hye (as herself)
Runtime: 86 minutes
Streaming Platform: Not currently streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Viki, or Kocowa in the United States. (Recent U.S./Canada viewings occurred via limited festival/event streams.)
Director: Seo Dong-il
Overall Story
The film opens in the gentle clutter of everyday life, where Eun-hye knits, tidies, and hums, the rhythms of home echoing a life often underestimated by others. The camera never gawks; it settles beside her, letting small gestures do the talking. We learn that Eun-hye lives with Down syndrome, and we feel the weight of what the world decides that means before we hear what it means to her. Her mother’s voice is warm but practical, ushering the day forward, while her stepfather—the director—quietly frames their lives with patience. There’s a sense that the family has weathered many rooms of doubt to get here. Before a single portrait is drawn, the documentary plants us inside a family that chose curiosity over fear.
On a bright market day along the Munho River in Yangpyeong, stall tents bloom like paper flowers, and Eun-hye sets out her markers and paper as if opening a tiny clinic for souls. People come in pairs, in giggling groups, or alone with shy smiles, sitting across from her in that uncertain space between self-consciousness and hope. “Please make me look pretty,” they say; it’s a joke and a wish in the same breath. Eun-hye glances up, nods, and answers, “But you’re already pretty,” an answer that resets the room’s gravity. Then she begins: chin, cheekbones, a flicker of mischief in an eyebrow—she catches presence, not perfection. The market bustle fades to a pulse under the softness of her attention.
Eun-hye’s line is confident but unhurried; the film lingers on her hands as if they’re learning a new language every time. A teenager arrives with an anxious friend who hates photos; they both leave laughing, clutching portraits that look like them the way memories look like us—kind, a little bolder, strangely true. Next sits a silver-haired grandfather who says nothing until the end, when his eyes brim, and he whispers, “This looks like who I was.” The documentary never forces meaning, but it gives us room to feel how seeing and being seen can be a shared rescue. This is where it lands its thesis without speeches: faces are maps, and maps can be invitations home. And home, this film suggests, is a conversation where nobody has to earn their place.
Between market days we return to family life—laundry, food, quiet tea—where the director’s camera honors the dignity of routine. Eun-hye’s mother, both producer and parent, balances care with challenge, nudging her daughter toward work that expands her world without erasing her pace. We glimpse how creativity becomes a bridge when language is narrow or unkind. The film makes space for the social realities too: the cautious stares, the soft-spoken questions, the way accessibility is sometimes an afterthought. Yet it’s never an exposé; it’s a diary of persistence where love is logistical as much as lyrical. The calm of these scenes accumulates a power that loud triumphs rarely hold.
Back at the market, a drizzle turns to rain, and smudges threaten finished drawings. Helpers scramble, plastic sheets appear, and a customer jokes that her mascara is running on paper. Eun-hye shrugs, laughs, and starts again, treating the ruined portrait like a chance to look deeper. Have you ever noticed how some people redeem a moment just by refusing to panic? The director stays wide, letting us see that leadership can look like gentleness at the exact second chaos arrives. It’s one of the film’s clearest lessons: craft is not just technical skill; it’s the steadiness to stay with a person until they feel seen.
As word spreads, more faces arrive: a nurse on a break, a delivery driver, a young couple saving for a wedding, even a boy who quips about needing an “upgrade” before his school photo. Their requests echo our culture’s fixed camera on beauty, filtered and upgraded in a thousand apps. Eun-hye’s answer is always the same, but the portraits are not; she catches humor here, stubbornness there, a hidden sadness that softens into a half‑smile by the last line stroke. In these sequences the film shows how “art therapy” isn’t a curriculum but a relationship—one that can complement everything from mental health counseling to family support, even the practical realities of health insurance or disability benefits that often define people before their names do. The marketplace becomes a clinic where the medicine is attention and the side effect is relief.
The documentary threads in milestones without fanfare: a growing stack of finished portraits; a small community event where her work hangs like bright flags; a ledger noting that she has drawn thousands of faces. When she looks at the wall of images, the film invites us to read the gallery not as trophies but as evidence of time well spent. One patron returns to say her drawing helped during a hard week, pinning it above a desk as a daily nudge toward gentleness. Another asks to purchase a second portrait—“one for my mother”—because the first made their kitchen feel kinder. It’s hard not to think about our own spaces and which faces we choose to honor there.
There’s conflict, too, and the film lets it breathe. Someone off-camera wonders aloud if customers simply want flattery, if this is “real art.” Another insinuates that pity might be part of the line forming at her table. The documentary offers no scolding rebuttal; it just keeps watching as Eun-hye’s drawings keep converting skeptics into participants. Her stepfather-director, in interviews beyond the frame, has said she’s “proving herself through art” and inviting us into her expanding world—and you can feel that thesis inside every quiet victory. The question of what makes art “real” dissolves as soon as a face lights up. What remains is the unembarrassed joy of recognition.
Late in the film, the pace slows for a sequence of solitary drawing: no chatter, no line, just Eun-hye and a mirror. She studies herself with the same patience she gives strangers, tracing a profile that knows its own storms and still laughs easily at the market. The portrait she finishes isn’t a flourish; it’s a reconciliation. I thought about how many of us keep asking for “prettier” when what we need is “truer.” The film gently argues that truth, met with tenderness, is what makes beauty durable.
In the closing passages, the market winds down at dusk, the river catching the leftover light. Eun-hye packs her markers, accepts a last-minute request, and sends the couple off with a wave that looks like a benediction. Have you ever left a place feeling taller, even if nothing about your body changed? That’s how this ending plays—modest, glowing, complete. The camera lingers not on applause or headlines, but on a face remembering how it felt to be seen.
Highlight Scenes / Unforgettable Moments
- “But you’re already pretty.” A young woman nervously asks for a flattering portrait; Eun-hye smiles and answers with her signature reassurance. The woman laughs, the tension breaks, and the drawing session turns into a conversation about interviews and confidence. In five minutes, the film shows how affirmation can be precise, not vague: it lands on the person right in front of you. This simple exchange becomes the movie’s heartbeat, repeated in variations throughout. It’s the line that turns customers into co-authors of their own portraits.
- Rain on paper. A sudden shower threatens a table of finished drawings. Helpers scramble while Eun-hye calmly starts re‑drawing one that smudged, asking the customer to tell her a favorite memory as she works. The new portrait carries that story in the eyes, and the customer decides to frame both versions—“the rainy one” and “the sunny one.” The scene reframes “mistakes” as second chances to see more deeply. Craft isn’t control here; it’s resilience married to kindness.
- The grandfather’s smile. A quiet elder sits for a portrait, poker‑faced until the reveal. When he sees what she’s noticed—his mischievous eyebrow, the softness around the mouth—his composure cracks into a grin that feels years younger. The film doesn’t add music or commentary; it just lets his joy be the soundtrack. You can almost feel decades of self‑dismissal loosen in the space of a glance. It’s one of the purest moments of the documentary.
- Family logistics, holy work. At home, her mother plans bus routes, meal times, and weather checks for the next market weekend. Nothing is sentimentalized: love is scheduling, snacks, and sunscreen. For many families supporting adults with disabilities, that logistics grind intersects with big-life decisions—health insurance renewals, transportation passes, even budgeting for supplies—and the film honors that invisible labor. Watching them review the day’s plan feels like watching devotion in its most practical form. The tenderness is all in the details.
- The wall of faces. A local event strings dozens of her portraits along a hallway; people point and find themselves, then linger to study strangers. The camera drifts, showing how a collective gallery can braid community out of brief encounters. A teen poses beside her drawing like it’s a diploma; a mother takes a photo for her living-room wall. The scene quietly suggests what a charitable donation to community arts can do: not just fund materials, but fund belonging.
- Self-portrait at dusk. Near the end, Eun-hye turns the mirror on herself. There’s no score, only evening sounds and the scratch of marker on paper. When she finishes, she gently taps the page, as if to say, “there you are.” It’s not a triumphal flourish; it’s an arrival. I exhaled, realizing how long I’d been holding my breath.
Memorable Lines
- “But you’re already pretty.” – Jung Eun-hye, answering a customer’s request It’s funny at first, then disarming, and finally radical. The sentence reframes the purpose of the portrait: not to fix a flaw but to celebrate a presence. As the film repeats this exchange, we feel the line working like a small therapy session, easing a lifetime of comparisons. I left wanting to practice this with my own friends.
- “Please make me look pretty.” – A customer’s shy request that becomes the film’s recurring prompt We’ve all said a version of this, haven’t we? It’s vulnerability wrapped in humor, a way to ask for kindness before the mirror looks back. The documentary treats the line not as vanity but as a human plea to be held gently. In that way, it becomes a mirror for our age of filters and upgrades.
- “To me, your face is more than what you see.” – The film’s guiding sentiment This statement, used in the film’s materials, captures how each drawing looks past symmetry toward story. It’s the north star for both artist and audience, telling us what to watch for: the nicks and laugh-lines where life has done its best work. Hearing it, I felt the film asking me to look at my own face with kinder eyes. It’s a manifesto made of grace.
- “She is expanding her art world on her own and inviting people into it.” – Director Seo Dong‑il, speaking about Eun‑hye Coming from a parent and filmmaker, this line resonates as both witness and challenge. It reminds us that inclusion isn’t a favor; it’s an invitation to a world already in motion. The film shows how that world expands with every market day, every portrait, every smile. By the end, we realize we’ve been invited too.
- “Everyone is born pretty from the beginning.” – An ethos Eun‑hye repeats as she draws The sentence lands like a gentle verdict against the harshness of our image economy. It reframes beauty as birthright, not a prize to be won or bought. Hearing it, I thought about how families plan for the future—health insurance paperwork, disability benefits, even long‑term budgeting—because protecting dignity has financial contours too. The film, without preaching, keeps placing worth where it belongs: in the person, not the paperwork.
Why It's Special
From its opening minutes, I Want to Know Your Parents throws you into a moral storm most of us hope we’ll never face: what would you do if your child were accused of being the bully who pushed a classmate to the edge? The film invites you to sit at that long, fluorescent-lit conference table and feel the weight of every word, every sigh, every glance. If you’re watching in South Korea, you can stream it on Disney+; for North American viewers as of December 4, 2025, availability shifts across digital stores, so check your preferred VOD platform. But wherever you press play, the film’s ache is the same: it asks whether love without accountability is love at all.
Have you ever felt this way—pulled between protecting someone you love and doing what you know is right? That’s the heartbeat of the movie’s storytelling. It’s not just about a tragedy at a prestigious school; it’s about how adults bend rules to save face, how truth gets negotiated behind closed doors, and how a single confession can cut through carefully staged silence. The writing mirrors that hush: conversations unfold like chess, and every move has a cost.
What makes the film especially gripping is its point of view. Instead of lingering on the victim or the investigators, it zeroes in on parents and educators—people who wield soft power and social capital. That perspective is unsettling by design, confronting viewers with privilege, complicity, and the way “good intentions” can become smoke screens. Even critics noted the film’s unusual lens on school violence, which can feel like a mirror held uncomfortably close. Have you ever recognized yourself in a character you didn’t want to be?
Director Kim Ji-hoon guides the story with the patience of a slow-motion catastrophe. His camera favors plain rooms and tidy corridors, putting performances first and letting the dialogue do the heavy lifting. You can sense the filmmaker who once engineered large-scale spectacle in The Tower and Sector 7; here, he pours that sense of mounting dread into a contained, conversational thriller where each closed-door meeting plays like a pressure-cooker set piece.
The emotional tone is a tightrope between restraint and eruption. Characters speak politely until they don’t; apologies are offered, retracted, weaponized. The genre blend—part social drama, part morality thriller—keeps the film from slipping into melodrama. Instead, it feels like a procedural of the soul, in which reputation becomes evidence and empathy stands trial.
Crucially, the film refuses easy villains. Parents here are terrified, proud, flawed; teachers are idealistic yet compromised; the system itself is both sanctuary and snare. By the time a single voice decides to tell the truth, the moment feels less like a twist and more like a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.
And when the credits roll, the aftertaste is productive discomfort. You may find yourself rethinking how you talk about “kids being kids,” or how you react when a community closes ranks. In classrooms, living rooms, and group chats, this is the kind of story that lingers—because it dares to ask not just what happened, but who we become when power is on the line.
Popularity & Reception
Upon its theatrical debut in South Korea on April 27, 2022, the movie generated spirited conversation about parental privilege and institutional responsibility. It wasn’t positioned as a blockbuster; instead, word-of-mouth centered on its unsettling moral questions and the way they echoed real debates happening in schools and PTA meetings across the country.
Critically, responses were mixed but engaged. Some praised the cast’s committed performances and the film’s willingness to stare down uncomfortable truths; others wished for tighter editing and more stylistic bite. Cine21, for example, highlighted the bold decision to approach school violence through the perpetrators’ orbit—a choice that courts contention by design.
After theaters, the conversation found a second life at home. Its arrival on Disney+ in South Korea placed the film a click away for parents and educators who might have skipped a theatrical trip, sparking new waves of discussion about accountability, conscience, and the ethics of protection.
Internationally, the movie’s reach has been steadier than splashy. It trickled to global audiences through digital storefronts and curated film communities rather than a single, massive streaming push, which actually suits its intimate, debate-provoking nature. Viewers outside Korea often discovered it via recommendations from teachers, school counselors, and true-crime and social-issue film circles comparing it with stage-play adaptations and ethical dramas.
That “slow-burn fandom” shows up in thoughtful reviews and long comment threads where people share personal stories—of classrooms they teach, kids they’re raising, and cases they remember from the news. The film may not be designed to dominate charts, but it’s calibrated to start conversations, and in that sense, it keeps doing the job.
Cast & Fun Facts
Sol Kyung-gu plays Kang Ho-chang, a high-profile attorney who believes the law can be navigated if you know which doors to knock on. He’s not a mustache-twirling antagonist; he’s a father whose confidence in systems—legal, social, educational—has always served him. Sol lets us see the tectonic plates beneath the lawyer’s composure: the instincts of a protector, the reflex to negotiate, and the dawning fear that some problems can’t be “handled.”
Sol’s history with director Kim Ji-hoon runs through Korean mainstream cinema—remember his centerpiece turn in The Tower. That prior collaboration pays off here in miniature. Instead of racing up smoke-choked stairwells, Sol sifts through clauses and compromises, and the stakes feel just as breathless because they involve his child’s future and someone else’s grief.
Chun Woo-hee is Song Jeong-wook, the homeroom teacher whose conscience becomes the story’s fulcrum. Chun is a specialist in fragility under fire; she plays Song as a person who knows exactly how much her silence would be worth to powerful people—and speaks anyway. The performance is quiet but decisive, like a match struck in a dark, oxygen-thin room.
What’s compelling is how Chun shapes the film’s moral geometry. She isn’t written as a saint; she’s a teacher who has made compromises in a competitive school ecosystem. When she breaks with that pattern, Chun makes it feel both inevitable and brave, reminding us that ethics often enter the room not with a shout, but with a tired person finally saying, “This is what happened.”
Moon So-ri plays the victim’s mother, and her presence shifts the movie’s temperature by several degrees. Moon has a way of grounding ethical debates in bodily experience—how grief changes your posture, how anger makes you swallow words before you say them. In scenes that could tilt into courtroom theatrics, she brings the focus back to the human cost.
Her character isn’t there merely to beg for justice; she interrogates the polite choreography that keeps truth at bay. Moon’s gaze does as much as any monologue: it asks the parents across the table if they’re capable of seeing beyond their own last names, and it asks us the same question.
Oh Dal-su appears as Do Ji-yeol, one of the influential parents pulled into the school’s widening crisis. He embodies a certain brand of practiced authority—genial on the surface, steel beneath. The role leans into how power often smiles before it tightens its grip.
A real-world footnote: the film’s release was delayed in part amid controversy surrounding Oh in 2018, one of several projects left in limbo during that period. The eventual 2022 release reframed conversation around both the movie and the industry’s accountability, adding another layer to how audiences read his character on screen.
Director/writer note: Kim Ji-hoon—whose filmography spans large-scale disaster (The Tower), creature-feature spectacle (Sector 7), and the disaster-comedy Sinkhole—tackles disaster of a different kind here: reputational collapse. Working from Gim Gyung-mi’s screenplay, adapted from Seigo Hatasawa’s stage play Oya no Kao ga Mitai, Kim compresses spectacle into ethics, turning conference rooms into battlegrounds and signatures into cliffhangers.
Conclusion / Warm Reminders
If stories about complicated love and inconvenient truth speak to you, I Want to Know Your Parents is worth your evening and the conversation that follows. South Korean viewers can find it on Disney+; if you’re in the U.S., a quick search of digital stores can surface an Apple TV rental or an Amazon Prime Video purchase option when it cycles in. A Disney Plus subscription might bring it to your watchlist sooner in certain regions, but however you see it, bring someone you trust and keep talking afterward. Have you ever felt this way—torn between protecting your own and protecting what’s right? That tension is exactly why this film matters.
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