REVIEW: ‘Plastic Beauty’ Explores The Desire To Be Beautiful Through A Muddy Narrative

Plastic Beauty, a Japanese drama miniseries directed by Yuki Saito and written by Jun’ya Ikegami, follows Doctor Fumi Numata (Maya Matsuoka), a gifted doctor whose life falls apart after a choice made during surgery leads one of her patients to kill themselves. With her job gone and weighed down by her mother’s debts, she is forced to work at a prestigious plastic surgery clinic under the supervision of its director, Rin Tohyama (Riisa Naka, Cells at Work!), despite her strong opposition to cosmetic surgery.

Over the course of Plastic Beauty, it uses its time to explore the many reasons why someone would wish to have plastic surgery. Often assumed to be an act pursued purely for vanity, Plastic Beauty takes a deeper look, arguing that there are far more reasons to consider the practice than that. Something that Numata initially struggles with. 

Much of the reasoning and decisions patients make that challenge Numata’s preconceptions about the practice are genuinely enlightening. They show numerous alternative reasons someone may choose to go under the knife, without completely glossing over the problems that can also come with it. It also does a good job of deepening the position of many doctors who practice cosmetic surgery, with a special focus on Tohyama. That’s where the messaging gets a little muddy.

Plastic Beauty takes a deeper look at patient motivations beyond vanity.

Initially presented as a self-serving egotist concerned only with her clinic’s image, Plastic Beauty reveals that Tohyama genuinely cares about helping people. Rather than judge those who arrive at her practice, as Numata initially does, she tries to give people what they need to “live their best lives.” 

While this attempt to deepen Tohyama works to an extent, it glosses over some elements that feel contradictory to this presentation. Most notably is the clinic’s advertising. We repeatedly see huge video billboards with Tohyama’s face on them, basically saying that if you want to live your best life, you need to be beautiful, and her clinic is the place to go. This messaging doesn’t make her look “willing to help” so much as it feels like she’s planting the seed of the problem in the first place. 

This shortcoming is further amplified by the lack of any acknowledgment of the difference between helping and enabling. Whatever a person’s motivations might be, there are times when trying to help isn’t the right step. Just because a patient wants something doesn’t mean they should get it. Numata pushes this at first, but is slowly dissuaded for the most part. 

The series’ failure to tackle accountability is one of its many glaring problems.

This push toward non-refusal, except in the most extreme circumstances, stems from one of the series’ biggest failures: self-accountability. Throughout Plastic Beauty, people do things in response to events, not forced by them, and the narrative constantly expects the character who caused the initial event to feel guilty. It is never even brought up that the second person chose to do a bad thing.

The blame for the aftermath is simply laid at the feet of the one who created the situation, whether they were in the right or not, because they failed to heed the other person’s feelings or warnings. This is doubly true when it is Numata making a decision.

How Plastic Beauty treats its main character eventually becomes its biggest problem. While Numata certainly has room to grow as a person, the series loves to make her out to be the bad guy in virtually every social situation she’s placed in, despite often bearing the brunt of others’ scorn or anger for extended periods of time.

Numata can’t escape being the bad guy, and this ties into how poorly accountability is treated.

Her family gets to judge and talk down to her all they like, but the moment the pressures at work and home make her snap, she’s the monster. She’s the only one who needs to grow and apologize. Apparently, it only counts as a fight once two people are upset. 

The personal lives of Numata and Tohyama eventually come to take up a fair amount of the series’ runtime, to its detriment. It feels like the program could’ve done a lot more to explore the core elements of the industry it centers on, if it didn’t waste so much of its time delving into soap opera-style drama and plot twists. Even if they were handled skillfully, they would feel unnecessary; as it stands, they are actively detrimental for the most part. 

This problem is most apparent throughout Plastic Beauty‘s finale. So many decisions are made, taken back, altered, and surprise-twisted that it gets exhausting. This overwrought exit leaves a lingering bad taste in the mouth, despite the fair amount of good the series presents overall. 

The finale can’t save what has been a muddled viewing experience.

Despite the sheer amount of drama Plastic Beauty packs into its narrative, the acting does a good job of keeping itself grounded. Both Matsouka and Naka anchor the emotional presentation well, establishing a dramatic but grounded cast-wide performance. The emotional beats hit with a fair amount of force until the series makes it clear that a choice is likely to be overturned, possibly before the episode it’s made in even finishes. 

Plastic Beauty has an intriguing, enlightening core when it focuses on its main premise. However, it oversimplifies many of its interpersonal moments, creating resolutions that feel far from reasonable. Combine that with an overwhelming number of extraneous plot points, and the series becomes its own worst enemy, finding success only when it can keep its focus where it needs to be.

Plastic Beauty is streaming now, exclusively on Netflix.