From Cinderella to The Substance... and the rest is the story.
The Ugly Stepsister follows the trend of female body horrors already explored by Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), and pushes the genre to its absolute limit by combining grotesque imagery with a dark atmosphere...
A retelling of the classic Cinderella tale, The Ugly Stepsister, has little to do with a fairy tale. It is, rather, an extreme, raw depiction of a society where beauty is everything, and where, as a woman, you're born with one expectation: either meet that beauty standard or die miserable.
Elvira (Lea Myren) has a dream: to marry a Prince, whose collection of poems she secretly keeps and reads in her room every day, and to live happily ever after. When her mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) is left a widow, broke and with three daughters to care for – including Elvira's sister, Alma (Flo Fagerli), and Agnes/Cinderella (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the stepdaughter her late husband left her, Elvira decides her moment has finally come: she's going to marry the Prince and make her mother rich. But soon, she realises that role doesn't fit her: she's fat, clumsy, wears braces and has a hump on her nose—all characteristics that make her look "not beautiful enough".
And so, as the film begins, we already know how it's going to end. What surprises most is Blichfeldt's ability to capture the audience's eye, to fully ensnare it and torture it, brutally and ruthlessly. Nothing here is omitted or left to imagination: we witness every stage of the grief of Cinderella's stepsister, as she attempts to change her physical appearance and "gain" more beauty, until it runs through us and becomes our own. The director perfectly illustrates how searching for an impossible ideal of beauty can easily turn into a full-blown addiction: the more you obtain, the more you desire. It's like a worm that can—literally—devour you from the inside.
While everyone seems to gain something from Elvira's transformation except her, Alma is the only one who immediately understands what they're actually doing to her sister, but every effort to save her proves futile, until the worst happens. She's only a child when she becomes aware of what awaits her—the loneliness and despair she feels, as her body slowly grows into that of an adult female, is nothing but the untold experience of many women during their pre-teen years.
On the other side, there's the figure of a mother who, blinded by her thirst for money, carelessly exposes her own daughter to the most painful aesthetic surgeries – we even see her browsing through a catalogue of nose shapes and selecting one with the same, remarkable nonchalance a person shows while ordering a dish at a restaurant.
Despite the large number of explicit scenes and an almost two-hour runtime, the film balances psychological depth with shock value, avoiding boredom or repetition. It is a well-done tribute to David Cronenberg's legacy, where the body becomes a battlefield in both the literal and metaphorical sense—the cut-eye scene also recalls the iconic one in Un Chien Andalou (1929), as it aims to physically hit those watching. In each sequence, every detail appears meticulously crafted; even the cinematography itself evokes a "sense of touch" by purposely choosing a grain effect typical of old films, and a thoughtful choice of effects and colours.
The Ugly Stepsister follows the trend of female body horrors already explored by Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), and pushes the genre to its absolute limit by combining grotesque imagery with a dark atmosphere that crosses the line between dream and reality, reminiscent of Eastern European folklore cinema that flourished in the Sixties and Seventies. It is a brutal one, and it doesn't hide that.
While it may not be for everyone, it certainly offers an interesting, unusual and powerful perspective on women's issues, something cinema needs right now.
The Ugly Stepsister is now playing in selected theatres worldwide and streaming on Shudder (U.S only).
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