On the night of Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) and Otto’s (Ralph Carlsson) wedding, the honeymoon is cut short when the new husband dies during the dessert course.  This leaves the now twice widowed Rebekka in charge of the sprawling estate which she finds out all too late is money poor.  In retaliation for being deceived, she lashes out against her new stepdaughter, the beautiful Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), while funneling what little resources remain towards subjecting her eldest daughter, Elvira (Lea Myren), to various, primitive plastic surgeries in hopes that this beautification will allow her to enchant Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) at the upcoming royal ball and finally bring her into fortune. 

Emilie Blichfeldt writes and directs The Ugly Stepsister, “Den stygge stesøsteren” in its spoken Norwegian, for Shudder.  The 105-minute body horror-comedy is a pop-punk adaptation of The Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” opting to filter the story though the lens of the eponymous ugly stepsister who normally spends tellings of this tale regulated to the shadowy corners of the dark estate where the evil stepmother rules.  With Marcel Zyskind behind the camera capturing it all and John Erik Kaada’s anachronistic synth score, this retelling of the classic story casts a campy spell with lots to delight its audience. 

Myren has her work cut out for her, but Blichfeldt’s script provides the actress with a fully realized character, unique given how little agency over her own arc she has.  As an actress and despite this character dynamic, Myren never is content to let Elvira sit back and be passive, her goals from the fantasy we witnessed in the opening scene as she imagined the rickety donkey driven cart she was being hauled in for the elaborate horse drawn carriage of the Prince’s own fleet are always present.  It works because, at least from a bird’s eye view, her goals are aligned with that of her mother’s in that they are both seeking to be elevated from their current class. There are flashes of that longing, taking the form of jealousy as she is constantly drawn in by Agnes’ hairbrush, a bit of fatal foreshadowing as her own hair begin to fall out by the handful later in the film, and these simmering relationships is what drives the film excitingly forward.  Myren, costumed by Manon Rasmussen and with makeup led by Anne Cathrine Sauerberg and Thomas Foldberg leading up the prosthetic and special effects, is unflinching in playing a character whose deformities – mild as they may be to start; braces leading to an unnecessary, maternally-prescribed a nose job – are amplified to ironic but not humorous effect, and it is that commitment to an ever changing standard that always keeps her character clawing furiously ahead. It is never enough, however, and when she returns defeated from the ball having failed to capture the Prince’s eye, her mother is quick take Frederik von Bluckfish (Willy Ramnek Petri), the young beau who spent most of the ball partnered with Elvira, for herself.

In a way, The Ugly Stepsister has whiffs of Coralie Fargeat‘s The Substance (2024) by way of Emerald Fennell‘s punkish sensibilities and Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s gothic trappings.  Where the film diverged from Fargeat’s entry is that it was not the prince – a snide comment in the woods notwithstanding – that drove Elvira under the primitive surgical “knife,” but largely by her mother’s promoting that led the young girl to think that ingesting a tapeworm egg may not be all that bad of an idea after all. Both writer/directors are using body horror – or, as Blichfeldt referred to it, “beauty horror” – to examine the societal pressures assigned to women, but Elvira’s plight is quite upsetting given the juvenile and paternal aspects of the story, and that there are still instances in our modern society where parents and mentors putting young children through the ringer to achieve these impossible standards is just part of “stage life.”  It is bad enough that adults are subjected to such a microscope, but downright horrifying that young children are, too. Food has also taken an inverted prominence in Blichfeldt’s film as the grinding of a empty, parasite-bypassed stomach bellows across the dining room instead of the gnashing of shrimp under teeth or the ripping of skin from the bone in Fargeat’s condemnation of the commodification of the female body.  Even to compare the two films and pit their passing similarities against one another proves an unfortunate point at how women in filmmaking are viewed, and by extension how women are viewed at large by a society that has grown from the roots of a patriarchy, but to cling to a glimmer of hope, here, it is good and important that these stories are being told and that they are being told by women. 

Turning focus, then, back on to The Ugly Stepsister, Blichfeldt weaves a pretty perfect balance of shifting tones and bold concepts as she flips a beloved tale on its head and inside out.  She presents ideas rooted in body horror, but on its own terms, and uses humor in the form of absurdity not to soften the effects of the limited gore that is present, but rather to use that sharp wit with precision to strike the exactly right nerve of her audience.  By stripping Elvira of most of her agency and instead having her mother act on her behalf, Elvira takes on an almost tragic arc, let down and betrayed by those whom she should have been able to trust.  This concept is teased out in a way that all good fairy tales are able to do, by masking the message in fantasy so that the deep cutting message of its thesis is not delivered as a hack job with a lanky blade, but rather a slowly imprinted mark that we do not realize is being branded at the time, yet lingers long after the film ends. It is not the cleaving off of toes, but rather the lingering strain of a corset too-tightly tied.