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Screamboat Willie notwithstanding, horror is the natural avenue for so many of the stories once told by Walt Disney. Making these films more “real” doesn’t mean merely translating their fantastical elements into live-action, but staring their warped, didactic nature in the face. The uneasy, scared-straight side of fairy tales has always lurked in the subtext of Disney’s princess films, but rarely do they get pushed to their gory limit like in The Ugly Stepsister. The impressively nasty first feature from Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt, this grimmer than Grimm take on Cinderella invokes the violent moralizing of the 19th century to tell body-horror geeks the world’s most upsetting bedtime story.
The set-up is by the storybook, as is the feasts-castles-and-gowns aesthetic beautifully staged by Blichfeldt, production designer Sabine Hviid, and costume designer Manon Rasmussen. But beauty is only skin-deep in this world, and looking a little closer reveals rotting food, deteriorating manors, and moth-eaten rags. The reason that Elvira (Lea Myren) is put through a medieval makeover is to follow in the seductive footsteps of her gold-digging mother (Ane Dahl Torp). While her mom has recently landed them a place to stay by marrying up, financial security remains a daydream perpetuated by the princes and love poems that fill Elvira’s imagination. So, when the local prince announces a ball, and invites Elvira and her perfectly pretty Cinderella stand-in stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the heroine must devote herself, body and soul, to excruciating beauty standards in order to meet the expectations of her terrible mother and the equally terrible royalty she wants to impress. This is the process by which The Ugly Stepsister gets more and more brutal—looksmaxxing in a Dark Age dungeon.
Drops of The Substance ooze from the film’s severed extremities and anesthetic-free nosejobs, though its critique of beauty standards isn’t so self-loathing as it is generally furious at a larger social perspective. “Beauty is pain” becomes literally torturous. It’s not that Elvira inherently detests her body, her face, her poise, her status. It’s that the powers that be in her life—the political and economic patriarchy of nobility, and her mother’s desire to play that game by its rules—are telling her to at every opportunity. Silently, so is Agnes, whose effortless blonde Disneyness doesn’t require sewn eyelids or parasitic weight-loss. That the snobby stepsister is also sexually experienced, comfortable in her body, makes her a hateable foil as the curly-haired brunette heroine begins more fully embodying the insecurities of those around through visceral grotesquery. The film’s female jealousy in service of mediocre men is as cutting as any of the bloody bits.
The Ugly Stepsister‘s black-humored punishment of the human body is as unrelenting as it is tactile—the makeup and FX teams work seamlessly to make the gangly Elvira suffer. Myren winningly obliges by spending the film screaming, puking, or weeping through her scenes, when she’s not stretching a pained Pearl-like smile across her face. She serves less as a scream queen and more as a biological vehicle for gross gags. But The Ugly Stepsister isn’t torture porn. Though the film’s inventive purveyors of pain certainly hold nothing back as they physically disenchant the heroine’s naive notions about romance, it does it all with a wink and a grin, as devious as any “but this is how the fable really went” adaptation.
The blistering, squirm-inducing satire may only really have a single observation to make, but Blichfeldt makes it with admirably juicy confidence. From the lush decorations to the gush of body fluids, The Ugly Stepsister puts a modern twist on an old story in the best way: By embracing the source from such a committed new perspective that its message naturally follows suit.
Director: Emilie Blichfeldt
Writer: Emilie Blichfeldt
Starring: Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp, Flo Fagerli, Isac Calmroth, Malte Gårdinger
Release Date: April 18, 2025
