Norwegian Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister joins The Substance (2024) and Shell (2024) in an increasing number of films that use body horror to address the way the beauty industry shapes, mutilates, and grinds up women. Blichfeldt’s film is distinct in that it focuses not on contemporary plastic surgery regimens, but the myths that back and spawn them. The result is one of the most jaded, and also most moving, retellings of the Cinderella legend—a retelling which finds hope not in marriage or beauty, but in sisterhood.
As the title suggests, the film’s main innovation is to switch the focus of the story. The protagonist here isn’t Cinderella, aka Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), but her stepsister, Elvira (Lea Myren). Elvira’s mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) marries Agnes’ father Otto (Ralph Carlsson), because they’re each under the misapprehension that the other is rich. When Otto dies on their wedding night, leaving the family destitute, Rebekka decides her best option is to marry Elvira to someone wealthy—ideally the Prince (Isaac Calmroth).
Elvira’s willing; she’s fallen in love with the Prince’s poetry. Unfortunately, she’s also not plain, exactly, but ordinarily awkward for an adolescent girl. For this sin, she and her mother decide Elvira requires a series of brutal procedures—including breaking her nose and swallowing a tapeworm—to get her into form for the Prince’s decidedly shallow tastes.
The film could’ve made Elvira the unambiguous hero and turned beautiful Agnes into the villain. Alternately it could’ve kept the story’s dynamics and reveled in Elvira’s iniquity. But Blichfeldt chooses neither of those approaches. Instead, she sympathizes with both flawed antagonists.
Agnes is traumatized by the death of her father and the mistreatment by her stepmother—but she’s also cruel to the more naïve and more ordinary-looking Elvira, mocking and insulting her with little provocation early in the film. Elvira, for her part, is all yearning, hope, fairy tale dreams and desperate, bottomless self-loathing. At first, she wants to befriend Agnes, but when the other girl rejects her, she spirals into a fugue of increasing envy and rage. She betrays Agnes’ affair with a stable-hand, and ultimately threatens her with a knife after the ball when she realizes Cinderella, and not her, is the prince’s choice.
Agnes’ cruelty, and her beauty, are difficult to hold against her in part because her life’s a misery—not just the part where she’s mistreated as a servant, but also the fairy-tale ending where she winds up with an asshole prince she doesn’t even pretend she loves. Similarly, Elvira’s vendetta against Agnes is nothing compared to her horrific campaign of retribution and cruelty against herself.
The body horror is relatively mild in comparison to some of Cronenberg’s extravagant orgies of blood and viscera, or even next to the twisted flesh in The Substance. But there’s something intensely disturbing about watching a young girl do nightmarish things to herself. The scene where she tries to chop off her toes and then starts weeping because she hasn’t managed to detach them completely is harrowing in a way that’s much worse than the gross-out effects or jump scares of most genre fare. (If you are looking for those, the tape worm extraction scene will probably satisfy.)
If the film was just Agnes and Elvira and the unfeeling Rebekka, it would offer little but a catalogue of bleakness. Elvira, though, has a younger sister—Alma (Flo Fagerli). Alma—who’s handsome rather than beautiful— has little use for princes, fairy tales or gender-conforming femininity. There’s a wonderful moment in the opening minutes of the film where a servant tries to hand her into a coach and she looks at him with disgust before getting in on her own. Similarly, she’s the one person in the film who watches Elvira’s escalating self-mutilation with the appropriate horror. She tells her sister (accurately) that she’s mentally ill—and when Elvira eventually does make herself ugly through her bloody self-brutalization, Alma’s the one person who doesn’t care and still loves her.
This isn’t a happily-ever-after kind of film. But at the same time, it’s in many ways, despite the gore and anguish, a more hopeful version of the Cinderella legend than many reworkings. Blichfeldt refuses to treat some girls as heroines and others as villains; she refuses to see beauty as a contest and the losers as castoffs. Instead, she expresses solidarity for all those whose options are narrowed and whose worth is denied because of their looks, wealth, or gender. Most Cinderella stories are odes to marriage. The Ugly Stepsister is one of the few that’s an expression of love.