How far would you go to win the heart of a handsome, real-life prince who lives in his own castle? This is the conundrum Rebekka faces when her daughter, Elvira, is handed an invite to the ball of Prince Julian, and with it, an opportunity to marry their family into wealth and power. But as Rebekka goes to increasingly extreme lengths to transform her ‘ugly’ daughter into something aesthetically ‘beautiful’, Elvie plummets into a contest for perfection that changes her in ways she could have never imagined.
This is The Ugly Stepsister, a fable of physical idealism as old as humanity itself. But Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt doesn’t simply reimagine a fairytale that’s deeply unsettling and darkly funny: like Angela Carter in her unmatched Bloody Chamber, she reminds us of the genre’s roots as feminist critique.
In analysing Coralie Fargeat’s Substance as a contemporary fairytale, Jessica DeFino notes that: “Fairytales served as a form of feminist consciousness-raising. […] They reflected the conditions of women’s oppression.” The Ugly Stepsister, with its parallels to “Cinderella”, can also be regarded as a cautionary tale because, just like The Substance, “the very real violence that the beauty industry enacts on the body manifests in magically violent ways.” For Blichfeldt, though, the ‘very real’ very much takes precedence over the ‘magical’.
From reshaping her nose with a hammer and chisel, to swallowing a tapeworm to lose weight and hacking off her toes to fit Cinderella’s slender slipper, the procedures Elvira endures are disturbingly reminiscent (and the predecessors) to the increasingly popular cosmetic surgeries pushed on young girls by brands, social media platforms, marketing agencies and mothers, like Rebekka. Even Elvira’s fantasies, in which she is blonde and beautiful, getting swept off her feet by her also beautiful saviour, are as dreamlike and quixotic as recent perfume ads from Dior and Gucci. DeFino concludes: “Beauty is our favourite fairytale. […] We can’t escape.” It’s why The Ugly Stepsister, a story set in the 19th Century and based on a tale that can be traced as far back to Ancient Greece, still cuts like a knife in 2025.
Body horror focussed on the beauty industry’s inflictions on the female body might be the most important subgenre in horror cinema — and naturally, it’s female directors like Blichfeldt, Fargeat and Ana Lily Amirpour (“The Outside” in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities), to name a few, telling these twisted fairytales with the most poignancy. The Ugly Stepsister is a superb addition to this blossoming canon, and a breakthrough performance for Lea Myren.
Image: Marcel Zyskind
DISTRIBUTOR
Vertigo
DIRECTOR
Emilie Blichfeldt
SCREENPLAY
Emilie Blichfeldt
CAST
Lea Myren
Ane Dahl Torp
Thea Sofie Loch Næss
UK CINEMA
25 April 2025
DIGITAL
9 MAY 2025
