The Ugly Stepsister: Cinderella body horror is as cruel as the fairytale
Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s grotesque reworking of the Cinderella story creates a world where beauty is pain for some women, but life is pain for all of them.
- Reviewed from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival
Growing up, one realises that fairytales were never a realm of safety to begin with – much as our childhood bedtime stories and Disney marathons tried to convince us otherwise. But the lies we were told prove fertile ground for directors to expose the traps and trappings of Happily Ever After. Take Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard (2009) or the mermaid horror-musical The Lure (2015), films that sympathise with their female protagonists but have little mercy for the societal structures that chain them. The Ugly Stepsister too, rewrites a fairytale as a striking horror. For her debut feature (and early Sundance stand-out), Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt blends the more brutal folktale elements with phantasmatic longing to create a version of Cinderella where beauty is pain for some women, but life is pain for all of them.
Like every young girl in the kingdom, Elvira (Lea Myren) dreams of royal matrimony in hazy, rose-tinted images. In the greyish-green reality of a derelict mansion, she is the ‘ugly stepsister’ to the kind, doe-eyed Agnes (Thea-Sofie Loch Næss) whose dresses, trinkets, and beauty seem immeasurable. Self-conscious of her braces and sweet tooth, Elvira is timid, but her ringlet curls shake with assurance: “I will marry the prince,” she declares. Her mother lets out a sour laugh, but as soon as a royal ball is announced, her ridicule morphs into the nasty ambition to completely transform her daughter.
The Ugly Stepsister is only as cruel as the Grimm Brothers’ fairytale (which is a lot), but by including scenes of domestically performed rhinoplasty, some ocular horror, binge-eating, and a lot of puke, paints a deftly hyperbolised portrait of femininity. But even while wearing a metal nose brace (fixed by a velvet ribbon nonetheless), Elvira glows from within, immune to cruelty. Through her performance, newcomer Myren portrays Elvira with a calibrated blend of tragic devotion and innocence needed for a seemingly juvenile, yet quite physically demanding role.
While body horror is part and parcel of many fairytales, the film also delights in turning the well-known Cinderella iconography grotesque by proxy, be it a pumpkin, slipper, or a puffy blue dress. Blichtfeldt never comes at beauty standards from a didactic angle (like say 2024’s The Substance), leaving room for the audience to question complicity more broadly. In the film, identification feels elastic; instead of trading our allegiance with Cinderella to her misunderstood stepsister, it asks us to extend empathy to all the female characters who prefer to hurt each other. A fluid point of view here not only decenters men but proves that what every girl dreams of is not really the love of a Prince, but that of her mother.