‘The Ugly Stepsister’ Review: Beauty Is Pain in a Squeamish Cinderella Story for the Feminist Body Horror Age

Sundance: Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt swaps tapeworms for silkworms in a gory Grimm Brothers update about the body-horror extremes of the pursuit of beauty.

It’s tough times out there for a feminist body horror fairy tale in a newly post-“Substance” filmmaking world. Coralie Fargeat’s gory parable of the abyss of self-loathing at the center of women’s society-stoked quest for beauty upped the stakes in terms of the genre’s potential cultural reach. (Have a look at those horror-ceiling-shattering Oscar nominations, for one.)

But female genre directors have been responding to impossible, often body-contorting standards of beauty for decades. Enter Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt, who makes her gruesome entrée into that movement with her playfully grotesque feature debut “The Ugly Stepsister.” One character’s name being Sophie von Kronenberg in this stylized gothic retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ spin on Cinderella should offer enough portent for where the film is heading in all its nose-breaking, flesh-eating, tapeworm-infested grandeur.  

“The Ugly Stepsister” begins with the tragically forced communion of two families as the brace-faced, ringleted Elvira (Lea Myren) arrives via carriage at a Victorian estate in Sweden. The grounds are a swirl of 18th-century gothic details, recognizable to Grimm heads who can already smell the inevitability of awful events locking into place, and hazy, dreamlike ‘70s arthouse vibes, in part thanks to the postmodern title cards and a soundtrack of harps and synthesizers. In other words, here’s a classic story outfitted into something perhaps more bracingly modern — even if its storytelling techniques, female body horror aside, largely are traditional.

Elvira is the ugly duckling of her family, which includes money-lusting widowed mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) and Elvira’s more fair-headed sister Ama (Flo Fagerli). They’ve lost their patriarch and desperately need funds they hope to secure in the home of noble lord Otto (Ralph Carlsson) and his ethereally beautiful daughter, Agnes (Thea-Sofie Loch Næss), now Elvira and Ama’s stepsister. Agnes is the type of long-haired beauty you imagine on horseback in paintings or cloudy dream sequences of cheesy, horny ’80s movies, but she has an irascible, restless edge that comes to define her more vividly as the movie’s carriage ride to depravity careens off the tracks of the primmer tastes of the setup.

A feminist body horror fairy tale is often a study in beauty contrasts, and immediately, Elvira and Agnes are set up as classic nemeses as Elvira covets her stepsister’s elegance. In slapstick fashion, Otto dies suddenly at the dinner table, leaving the three women alone as a newly fractured family unit; in even more tragicomic terms, it turns out Otto and Agnes are dead broke. Which leaves the family no choice but to submit the daughters for contention at the nearby king’s ball, where four full moons from now, the hot prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) will choose one lucky virgin to be his princess.

Some key gender-swap choice aside, Blichfeldt hews closely to the shape of the original Grimm Brothers story in ways that, however inevitable, can’t escape predictability as Elvira undergoes transformations for the big ball. But the filmmaker spikes a well-worn tale with plenty of nasty body-horror set pieces that inject refreshing vim and vigor. Myren, working under a makeup team that includes Anne Chatrine Sauerberg and prosthetics artist Thomas Foldberg, is dumped in dowdiness from frame one — a, by society’s standards, too bulbous nose that is broken and resculpted with a hammer and harrowing clinical remove by a quack Dr. Esthetique (Adam Lundgren).

Another scene bound to induce winces and covered eyes involves a barbaric eyelash transplant procedure, cinematographer Marcel Zyskind’s camera bringing us way too close to the incisions and their aftermath. Then, there’s the co-headmistress of a posh finishing school who entrusts Elvira with a tapeworm that promises to bring her down a few sizes and flush out the hidden beauty within. None of this goes well, of course.

Blichfeldt credits body horror godfather David Cronenberg as an influence — how could she not? — though “The Ugly Stepsister” is more body horror in its formalism than spiritually in terms of the genre. The film lacks Cronenberg’s pathos and brooding philosophical inquiry, more interested in the surface of things without too deeply piercing them or leaving behind too gaping a wound. Sequences of Elvira starving herself and obsessing over her weight bore the points down like a drill, though the screenplay could do more to explore the lead’s subjectivity and how her self-lacerating pursuit of beauty is becoming infectious to all around her. Even as a tapeworm is eating her from the inside out, and as Elvira eventually, of course, succumbs to the worst possible method to get her feet to fit into that pesky slipper.

The secret-weapon character who makes the more haunting impression is Agnes, whose chignon hides a rebellious spirit underneath — as well as a furtive romance with the stable boy, Isak (Malte Gårdinger). What’s going on inside her head? Blichfeldt only gives us glimpses, but they’re enough to cast a chilling spell. All the body contortions, projectile tapeworm-vomiting, and severed toes aside, the film’s shiveriest sequence follows Elvira into the stables where she accidentally (?) spies upon Agnes, bent over, ass up, and ready to receive Isak in the only way that won’t besmirch her chastity. The sounds of horses bucking and huffing only heighten the primal, animalistic vibes in a scene that smash-cuts to Agnes being brutally admonished by her new stepmother, spurring Agnes’ own quiet war against Elvira.

The slow-burn setup (even despite punctuations of mad violence) all leads to the requisite gala centerpiece, where the quote-unquote new and improved Elvira is revealed to her potential Prince. Blichfeldt goes all out with the viscera while skimping on the soul, even as “The Ugly Stepsister” does offer a path out for its (and all of its society’s) tortured women. The tyranny of an unscaleable beauty hierarchy will forever be the inspired stuff of great horror moviemaking. While “The Ugly Stepsister” doesn’t go much deeper than Dr. Esthetique’s scalpel, the brazenly grotesque surface of the piece might just be deep enough.

Grade: B-

“The Ugly Stepsister” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Shudder will release the film later in the year.

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