Last Updated on April 21, 2025 by Angel Melanson
Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister is a manic exploration of the physical and psychological feats women undergo to be deemed desirable. An ideal film for former aspiring princesses, hardcore body horror fans, and anyone who ever wondered what a human butcher shop might look like set inside the palace of Versailles. Any individual trigger warnings on Blichfeldt’s feature debut are futile; there’s more than enough stomach-churning trauma for everyone packed into its 110-minute runtime.
The folktale of “Cinderella” has hundreds of variations from around the world, dating back thousands of years. Through each retelling, the heart of the story will usually remain the same: a rags-to-riches triumph of a breathtakingly gorgeous and congenial underdog and her race to a ball that will make all her dreams come true if she can just beat the clock (and every other girl in town).
At one time this story was considered the ultimate fairytale but, as Blichfeldt’s film realizes, maybe it’s time to reevaluate. A woman needing a handsome prince to rescue her from herself has evolved into a cringeworthy cliché saved for elder baby boomers and humorless aspiring tradwives, but the fantasy of Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty continue to alter childhood ideals at a deeper level than two generations of feminism can repair.
Blichfeldt’s retelling drills beneath skin-deep beauty and the toll its value takes on the conventionally and unconventionally attractive alike. Blichfeldt’s story forgets the caricatured renderings of conventional ugliness in the stepsisters of storybooks and cartoons, and casts both roles without regard for their physical beauty, focusing instead on the confidence, grace, and style projected by each character, their relationship to the kingdom around them, and their personal values. Even in a reformed society that claims to acknowledge ugliness as subjective and self-love as the key to happiness, a pretty woman can be driven to hideous behavior in her pursuit of being chosen.
Through a 2025 lens, Cinderella looks more like the girl who marries her best friend’s older brother, has three children by age 25, and never leaves her hometown. What could be viewed as a perfect life for some is not a one-size-fits-all Barbie Dream House the outdated fairytale led so many to believe.
Blichfeldt’s Cinderella in this case is Agnes, played by Thea Sofie Loch Naess, who embodies many of the character’s classic traits – seemingly effortless beauty, ethereal elegance, and more empathy than most of her peers. Her motivation to win over the prince is not money, status, or love, but escape as a woman forced into survival mode by her freshly widowed and endlessly narcissistic stepmother. Throughout the film, we learn Agnes is not chaste or cloyingly kind, but rather hyper aware that her good looks may be her only ticket out of the misery she is living in the wake of her father’s sudden death.
Blichfeldt’s version of the folktale does not subvert the story or plead innocence for the titular ugly stepsister like many other fairytale exposés, but seeks to highlight a more relatable angle. It’s an unqualified success; anyone whose hunt for a Prince Charming equivalent ended in heartache, humiliation, or therapy could find cinematic catharsis in The Ugly Stepsister.
The most brutal depictions of body horror are often not the science fiction spectacles we see in the world of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance or David Cronenberg’s The Fly. The initial trappings are often psychological, sometimes hallucinatory, and in this case, intimately perverse—they can culminate in self-mutilation or the only slightly less stigmatized spectrum of body modifications and extreme plastic surgery.
Today going under the knife and recovery thereafter all takes place behind closed doors and with state-of-the-art instruments and designer drugs, but the origins of these practices are less than pretty. Sparing no detail from the Brothers Grimm retelling of Charles Perrault’s Cinderella story, Blichfieldt takes her audience through every bloody, bone-breaking, infected step of Elvira’s dramatic beautifications.
Seeing this film with a large enough audience has record-setting potential for the world's loudest gagging sound (if anyone cares to measure). With only the slightest artistic license, Blichfeldt takes viewers on a fully exposed journey through crude practices of rhinoplasty, orthodontics, eyelash extensions, extreme weight loss, and, of course, DIY amputation. Many common beauty rituals past and present look and feel more like sadomasochism than an average pursuant will initially admit. Internalized self-disgust, or in this case a tapeworm, festers within Elvira on her self-mutilating path to beauty until she recognizes her own salvation means what went in… must come out.
In another feat of firsts for this film, Norwegian actress and fashion model Lea Myren proves herself fearless in the lead role of elder stepsister Elvira. Matching the intimacy and command of Gena Rowland’s Mabel in the John Cassavetes classic A Woman Under the Influence, Myren’s connection to her character is undeniable. When the camera follows every surgical procedure down to the stitch with unforgiving detail, it must also follow every flinch, grimace, wretch, and gurgle exuded by Elvira’s body.
This is a role that would be considerably tough for a seasoned actor, but any hesitancy in Myren’s debut film performance remains undetectable. An emotionally eviscerating third act scream stands to make or break the narrative’s credibility but Myren delivers, the moment lingering well after the credits roll.
The effects are practical and they are gruesome. For every gilded, corseted, and tufted moment of elegance in The Ugly Stepsister, there is a larger display of gore, gagging, pus, and vermin. Some of the most stunning scenes are more reflective of rot than riches. In the traditional story, Cinderella’s dress is formed and fitted by her fairy godmother and an entourage of mice, but those elements are replaced here by the presence of Agnes’s dead mother and the worms that fester inside her recently deceased father’s corpse, left to decay in the pantry of the stepmother’s home. If The Substance created a demand for revulsion, Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister snatched that demand and made it art.
