The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

Written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, The Ugly Stepsister filters the fairy tale of Cinderella through a feminist body-horror lens to lambast the impossible standards women are held to – both in this world and in folkloric fantasy worlds of make-believe. It follows Elvira (Lea Myren), a shy, awkward young woman who is driven by her mother, societal pressures, and by jealousy of her beautiful stepsister, to undergo gruesome cosmetic surgeries to make herself beautiful, win the heart of the prince and marry into wealth. Blichfeldt has created a daring work that blasts open the misogyny inherent in many literary fairy tales, revealing them to be a means of containing and controlling young women. Her screenplay ensures audiences glimpse the full horror of how glass slippers become glass ceilings, as female ambitions are forcibly limited, dreams corralled and bodies cruelly transformed. The film is laced with blood-dark humour as Blichfeldt sets about satirising and carving up patriarchal societal mores and customs, exposing the guts, absurdity and horror within.

Cinderella is an ancient story, the core of which is the idea of an unfortunate – but virtuous and beautiful - individual who is suddenly blessed with near-miraculous fortune. Countless variations existed in oral folk tales around the world before eventually being adapted into literary fairy tales by the likes of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, who used these stories to instil certain values and morality within young readers/listeners, teaching them of societal expectations. Yes, it's a story of hope and overcoming adversity, but it's also a story that renders women with limited, if any, agency, severely limiting their goals: make yourself beautiful to find a husband. Literary fairy tales almost always define their women characters by their appearance, their beauty (or perceived lack of). Think of any ‘fairy tale princess’, such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty or Rapunzel, and how they are described (spoiler alert: it’s always in terms specific to their appearance - ‘fairest of them all’, ‘skin white as snow’, ‘ruby red lips’ etc. and little else besides). They're rarely active, and most are desirable objects, as opposed to desiring subjects. Blichfeldt’s version depicts complex women characters not only pitted against one another (in competition to bag suitable husbands) but against themselves (with seeds of doubt and self-loathing planted within them by other women, including mothers and teachers) and is a damning indictment of society’s obsession with appearance.

Much of the horror in Blichfeldt’s film obviously stems from the modifications Elvira is subjected to (having her nose broken to reshape it, ingesting a tapeworm to lose weight, having artificial eyelashes threaded into her eyelids), and the casual, unfeeling way in which they are meted out. Perhaps more potently, however, Blichfeldt uncovers the horror from the unbearable pressure her female characters face to not only fit in, but to also stand out (but only in the ‘right’ way, of course). There's horror, too, in the idea of a young woman coming of age in a body image-obsessed society, only to glean that her body is not perceived to be good enough, and that she needs to mutilate herself to become more acceptable and desirable. Elvira's younger sister Alma (Flo Fagerli), who is the only one who shows any kindness to Elvira, watches proceedings with increasing horror. Indeed, when Alma menstruates for the first time, she doesn't tell anyone, and disposes of the bloodied bedsheets, afraid that becoming an adult will mean her mother will force her to undergo similar treatment.

Elvira is introduced as a timid and oblivious young woman, who eventually becomes driven by a desperation to obtain what was promised to her by adults whose motivations were entirely selfish, undergoing a painful transformation to fit in with society's beauty standards. Her initial mute acquiescence stems from a longing to gain her mother's approval, but she is eventually driven by her own grim determination to gain adoration from the prince and her peers after years of feeling unworthy and invisible. Elvira remains throughout a deeply sympathetic character. The increasingly grisly lengths she goes to fuel the uneasy tension, and Lea Myren's performance is astounding as she deftly conveys Elvira's devotion to obtaining her dreams, and the devastation she experiences when, after everything she has been subjected to, they collapse around her like shards from a cracked mirror.

Blichfeldt ensures her characters are all richly drawn – even Elvira’s cruel mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) is afforded a modicum of sympathy after the monstrous things she does. Indeed, we are invited to sympathise with all the women characters as they navigate a society in which they have limited options. Their success (and survival) depends on what they can obtain by using their beauty, and like Elvira's mother, their only hope is marrying, not for love, but for security. These are not cartoon characters, they are complex, with wills, wits, agendas and needs. Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the ‘Cinderella’ character, may be conventionally beautiful and worldly, but she is also earthy, sexual, plucky, humble and full blooded. She comes to be driven by her fury (her father's body is never buried, it is placed in a disused room in the house and left to deteriorate as the story unfolds) and desperation to escape her circumstances, rendered a servant in her own house after she's caught with her lover Isak, the family's farmhand.

Blichfeldt has created a disturbing, compelling and visually arresting film (think Walerian Borowczyk's The Beast [1975] and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette [2006]), drawing influence from Gothic Euro-horror of the 60s and 70s, and subverting fairy tale tropes into a menagerie of the grotesque. Elvira's reveries of riding on horseback with the handsome prince are deliberately saccharine and whimsical, and these serve to highlight her naivety, ensuring what comes after is rendered all the more horrifying. A particularly striking moment occurs when Agnes, in a fit of despair, visits her father's rotting corpse and has a vision of her dead mother, as flies whir about her like cottonwood seeds and silkworms silently repair her ripped ballgown. All backed by an ethereal electronic score by Vilde Tuv and John Erik Kaada. By foregrounding the inherent misogyny within literary fairy tales – one of the oldest forms of social control and indoctrination - Blichfeldt highlights an entire history of the gruelling standards women are held to in the name of beauty. An immensely grim (pun intended), unsettling work, not for the faint of heart.