This review of The Ugly Stepsister comes from its screenings at the Berlin International Film Festival. It will be updated for the movie’s American release.
The broad strokes of Emilie Blichfeldt’s feature debut, Den Stygge Stesøsteren (or The Ugly Stepsister), will be familiar to most viewers. There’s a fancy ball and an opportunity to meet a charming prince. There’s a lost glass slipper belonging to a woebegone waif, who becomes magically regal for one evening. And of course, there are her “ugly” stepsisters, who are jealous of her growing importance. In all but name, it’s Cinderella, the 19th-century Grimm fairy tale adapted for film and TV over and over in ever-changing forms, including via the 1950 Disney animated classic.
But Blichfeldt’s Norwegian farce leans into the story’s most unsavory aspects, turning them into a wildly visceral body-horror parable about beauty standards, deep self-loathing, and the lengths one teenager will go to just to fit into her ballgown.
Best Picture nominee The Substance has likely opened the door to some previously averse viewers giving horror a chance, and they’re all the better for it. Coralie Fargeat’s acclaimed comedy (a more malformed movie than Blichfeldt’s) satirizes the limiting images of women propagated and encouraged by modern Hollywood. But The Ugly Stepsister goes further back in time, to stories that have long since infiltrated common understanding through cultural osmosis.
Prototypical Cinderella stories date back to Ancient Greece — like the tale of Rhodopis, a Greek slave girl identified by her sandals, who marries the king of Egypt — and they’ve since come to share common DNA with many 20th-century Disney princesses, for whom grace and beauty are the ultimate virtues. The latter may not be a pressing concern for a modern filmmaker like Blichfeldt, but it makes for a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek framework, which she wields to tell a story about self-mutilation used to adhere to modern capitalistic standards and beauty practices.
The frame is often awash in a hypnotic haze, and the soundtrack is buoyed by the distinctly 1980s sounds of dreamlike synths, yanking the movie out of time — and making it essentially timeless. Its story follows Elvira (Lea Myren), a frumpy 19th-century brunette whose scheming stepmother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) marries the ailing father of the blond, blue-eyed, conventionally attractive Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the story’s Cinderella stand-in. Both parents believe they’re marrying into money, a dual deception that only comes to light once Agnes’ father dies, prompting Rebekka to figure out how best to doll up her daughters in time for the prince’s ball.
Learning to be prim and proper is a much shorter journey for the grieving Agnes, but her attraction to a local stable boy disqualifies her from partaking in the prince’s courtship rituals, for reasons both classist and deeply misogynistic. The entire premise of the ball is sexual and matrimonial in nature, but speaking these ideas out loud (or, God forbid, acting on sexual attraction) is a major societal no-go. This double standard leaves Elvira to shoulder Rebekka’s desperate hopes and dreams, forcing her to walk a careful line between recognizing her own adolescent libido — in a particularly sweet and funny scene, she’s brought to tears by the sight of a man’s toned buttocks! — and keeping a tight lid on her desires.
Myren is a notably pretty actress, and the trope of casting conventionally attractive women as characters deemed “ugly” — usually because of an impending makeover scene — isn’t lost on Blichfeldt. Where Greta Gerwig’s Barbie hung a lampshade on the idea (a fleeting, joking gesture), The Ugly Stepsister makes it a key part of its text, and Myren leans into it with her performance.
Her conception of Elvira is cartoonish in a fittingly Disney Channel way. She moves and reacts awkwardly in a modern, terminally online sense, as though the character’s discomforts were fueling an outwardly cringeworthy facade — which in turn fueled further anxieties, and so on. Each time a bodily imperfection is pointed out (usually by her mother or her etiquette teacher), Elvira practically folds in on herself, growing smaller in the frame, as though she were afraid to take up space. It’s a magnificently true-to-life flourish that captures the feeling of body dysphoria, and how it can hollow out someone’s very being.
Before long, Rebekka’s insistence that Elvira “transform” leads to deeply uncomfortable processes, beginning with a cosmetic doctor breaking her nose and placing it in a metallic vise so it gradually changes shape. Myren’s performance makes each step of this methodical makeover both hilarious and agonizing to watch, because on some level, it’s what she wants. (More specifically: It’s what she’s made to want by those around her.)
The horrors don’t stop at her nose. While she trains to walk with more poise, Elvira also has long, full eyelashes sewn into her eyelids, and she even swallows an illicitly acquired tapeworm egg, a sublot that builds over months, through uncomfortable gurgles, until it leads to an inevitable extraction. It’s a particularly wince-inducing scene, though not nearly the movie’s most disturbing one. Part of the Grimm’s Fairy Stories version of “Cinderella” involves her stepsisters failing to fit their feet into her dainty glass slipper, and cutting away parts of themselves to try to please and win the prince. But Blichfeldt isn’t content with leaving its tongue-in-cheek terrors to viewers’ imaginations.
The film’s watch-through-your-fingers sensation isn’t born from the alienness of body horror — it’s from the sheer intimacy of having ugliness foisted upon you as an identity, and the complicated process of trying to break free from this suffocating label. Notably, there are few men in the film who insist on Elvira’s metamorphosis. Perhaps the most poignant narrative flourish in The Ugly Stepsister is the idea that all its women characters have been trapped by these standards for so long that they understand them intuitively, and are willing to reinforce their invisible walls if it means a chance at getting ahead.
So, even the most painful requests Rebekka makes of Elvira need no explanation. Their reasons feel second nature, as does the notion that Rebekka’s “evil stepmotherhood” stems from the interrelated struggle of being an aging woman with little financial recourse other than to commodify beauty and youth. For these women, the specter of class trickles down generationally, before congealing into body fascism. The result is a smart, wildly fun, and viscerally jolting work, one that becomes downright upsetting when every aspect of its premise comes crashing down on Elvira at once — or rather, comes bursting forth from within her.
The Ugly Stepsister does not have an American release date yet, but Shudder has acquired it for distribution and plans a release later this year. Polygon will update this review when a release date is set.
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