Reviewed on January 23rd at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival – Midnight Section. 110 Mins
Cast: Lea Myren, Ane Dahl Torp, Flo Fagerli, Ralph Carlsson, Thea-Sofie Loch Næss
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Horror
Director: Emilie Blichfeldt
In Irish Cinemas: 25th April 2025
In today’s cinematic landscape, it’s a harsh climate for a feminist body horror fairy tale to make waves, especially in the shadow of a post-Substance era where genre filmmaking is being redefined. But Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a viscera-drenched allegory about the abyss of self-hatred fueling society’s obsession with feminine beauty, pushed the limits of how far horror can go culturally and thematically. It set a new bar—and a new burden—for what these kinds of films can achieve.
But long before The Substance ever unspooled on screen, female genre filmmakers have been dissecting the brutal, often surreal standards of beauty imposed on women’s bodies. Into this lineage steps Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt, whose debut feature, The Ugly Stepsister, is a wickedly inventive, unflinchingly grotesque entry in the feminist fairy tale horror subgenre. Blending dark humour, mythic iconography, and baroque gore, the film reimagines the Grimm Brothers’ Cinderella with an audaciously disgusting flair, where broken noses, tapeworms, and flesh-mangling beauty rituals abound.
The film’s title alone is a harbinger of the chaos to come, and the presence of a character named Sophie von Kronenberg in this stylised gothic tapestry sets the tone: this will not be your grandmother’s fairy tale. With one foot in 18th-century ornamentation and the other in hazy, 1970s arthouse dream-logic, Blichfeldt establishes a woozy, ornate visual world that is as enchanting as it is menacing.
We begin with Elvira (Lea Myren), an awkward, brace-faced teen with tightly curled ringlets, arriving by carriage to a Swedish manor straight out of a haunted Rococo painting. Her family—consisting of her vain, money-hungry widow mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) and ethereal, fair-haired sister Ama (Flo Fagerli)—has just lost its patriarch. They’re banking on the goodwill (and supposed fortune) of nobleman Otto (Ralph Carlsson) and his stunning daughter Agnes (Thea-Sofie Loch Næss), who becomes Elvira’s stepsister. Agnes looks like she stepped out of a romantic oil painting or a gauzy ‘80s softcore fantasy sequence—long hair, porcelain beauty—but her jagged edge quickly punctures the veneer.
Elvira, instantly positioned as the “ugly duckling,” becomes obsessed with Agnes’ effortless grace. As is custom in these tales, things spiral quickly. Otto promptly drops dead at the dinner table in a slapstick set piece, and the women, now financially destitute, must vie for a last chance at social security: a royal ball, set four full moons away, where Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) will select one virginal maiden to be his bride. The setup is classic, but Blichfeldt’s execution is far from expected.
Though she follows the rough narrative structure of the Cinderella myth, Blichfeldt explodes it from the inside out with gnarly body horror and biting satire. Elvira is subjected to a brutal transformation arc—literal and metaphorical reshaping of her identity in a world obsessed with beauty. Myren is outfitted in prosthetics and heavy makeup courtesy of artists Anne Chatrine Sauerberg and Thomas Foldberg, transforming her into a tragic grotesque: her nose, deemed too bulbous, is shattered and restructured with clinical indifference by the sinister Dr. Esthetique (Adam Lundgren), who seems more butcher than surgeon.
One especially squirm-inducing scene features an eyelash transplant procedure that brings the camera far too close to the slicing, stitching, and swelling aftermath. Later, in a moment that feels lifted from a satirical fever dream, Elvira is given a parasitic tapeworm by a finishing school headmistress who insists it will help her shed pounds and reveal the “true beauty” within. Unsurprisingly, none of these grotesque interventions go as planned.
There’s a clear lineage here to the body horror of David Cronenberg, whom Blichfeldt openly cites as a significant influence. But while The Ugly Stepsister borrows Cronenberg’s surgical aesthetic and queasy fascination with transformation, it lacks the philosophical gravitas and emotional undercurrent that make his films resonate beyond the gore. Where Cronenberg lingers on existential questions, Blichfeldt’s film often skims the surface, content to let the horror speak in extremes rather than introspection.
Still, there’s a hypnotic rhythm to Elvira’s spiral—her starvation, her compulsion to mutilate herself into something “beautiful,” her gradual internalisation of societal rot. The script could delve deeper into Elvira’s psyche, but the visual storytelling does much of the heavy lifting. In a darkly comic, horrifying twist, she ultimately resorts to the most infamous Grimm solution to the glass slipper dilemma—one that leaves blood soaking the royal carpet.
While Elvira is the focus, Agnes emerges as the film’s secret weapon. Behind her flawless façade lies a roiling storm of desire and rebellion, most potently expressed in a shocking scene involving a clandestine rendezvous with the stable boy, Isak (Malte Gårdinger). What begins as voyeurism on Elvira’s part quickly morphs into something primal, as the sounds of horses and flesh create a visceral symphony of repressed eroticism and animal instinct. The moment is cut brutally short by the wrath of Rebekka, setting off a quiet war between the two stepsisters that simmers until the film’s final, operatic acts of violence.
Everything builds to the inevitable gala, where the “transformed” Elvira debuts her new self to the world—and the prince. Here, Blichfeldt unleashes a crescendo of grotesquery: sequins smeared with blood, grins stretched by pain, a climax drenched in symbolic bile and literal body fluids. If there’s redemption in The Ugly Stepsister, it’s only faintly glimpsed—less a resolution than a jagged escape route carved out through trauma.
Ultimately, Blichfeldt’s debut may not cut as deeply as it wants to, but what it lacks in psychological complexity is compensated for in aesthetic bravado and thematic bite. The tyranny of beauty remains a fertile ground for horror, and The Ugly Stepsister digs in with gleeful menace. It’s a fairy tale refitted for a world where femininity is a performance etched in flesh, and the ugliest thing of all might be the mirror.
Overall: 7/10
Movie Reviewer
