It’s robust occasions on the market for a feminist physique horror fairy story in a newly post-“Substance” filmmaking world. Coralie Fargeat’s gory parable of the abyss of self-loathing on the middle of girls’s society-stoked quest for magnificence upped the stakes when it comes to the style’s potential cultural attain. (Take a look at these horror-ceiling-shattering Oscar nominations, for one.)
However feminine style administrators have been responding to unimaginable, typically body-contorting requirements of magnificence for many years. Enter Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt, who makes her grotesque entrée into that motion together with her playfully grotesque characteristic debut “The Ugly Stepsister.” One character’s title being Sophie von Kronenberg on this stylized gothic retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ spin on Cinderella ought to supply sufficient portent for the place the movie is heading in all its nose-breaking, flesh-eating, tapeworm-infested grandeur.
“The Ugly Stepsister” begins with the tragically pressured communion of two households because the brace-faced, ringleted Elvira (Lea Myren) arrives through carriage at a Victorian property in Sweden. The grounds are a swirl of 18th-century gothic particulars, recognizable to Grimm heads who can already odor the inevitability of terrible occasions locking into place, and hazy, dreamlike ‘70s arthouse vibes, partially due to the postmodern title playing cards and a soundtrack of harps and synthesizers. In different phrases, right here’s a traditional story outfitted into one thing maybe extra bracingly fashionable — even when its storytelling strategies, feminine physique horror apart, largely are conventional.
Elvira is the ugly duckling of her household, which incorporates money-lusting widowed mom Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) and Elvira’s extra fair-headed sister Ama (Flo Fagerli). They’ve misplaced their patriarch and desperately want funds they hope to safe within the residence of noble lord Otto (Ralph Carlsson) and his ethereally stunning daughter, Agnes (Thea-Sofie Loch Næss), now Elvira and Ama’s stepsister. Agnes is the kind of long-haired magnificence you think about on horseback in work or cloudy dream sequences of tacky, sexy ’80s films, however she has an irascible, stressed edge that involves outline her extra vividly because the film’s carriage experience to depravity careens off the tracks of the primmer tastes of the setup.
A feminist physique horror fairy story is usually a research in magnificence contrasts, and instantly, Elvira and Agnes are arrange as traditional nemeses as Elvira covets her stepsister’s class. In slapstick vogue, Otto dies all of a sudden on the dinner desk, leaving the three ladies alone as a newly fractured household unit; in much more tragicomic phrases, it seems Otto and Agnes are lifeless broke. Which leaves the household no alternative however to submit the daughters for rivalry on the close by king’s ball, the place 4 full moons from now, the recent prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) will select one fortunate virgin to be his princess.
Some key gender-swap alternative apart, Blichfeldt hews intently to the form of the unique Grimm Brothers story in ways in which, nevertheless inevitable, can’t escape predictability as Elvira undergoes transformations for the large ball. However the filmmaker spikes a well-worn story with loads of nasty body-horror set items that inject refreshing vim and vigor. Myren, working underneath a make-up staff that features Anne Chatrine Sauerberg and prosthetics artist Thomas Foldberg, is dumped in dowdiness from body one — a, by society’s requirements, too bulbous nostril that’s damaged and resculpted with a hammer and harrowing medical take away by a quack Dr. Esthetique (Adam Lundgren).
One other scene certain to induce winces and lined eyes entails a barbaric eyelash transplant process, cinematographer Marcel Zyskind’s digicam bringing us manner too near the incisions and their aftermath. Then, there’s the co-headmistress of a fancy ending faculty who entrusts Elvira with a tapeworm that guarantees to carry her down a couple of sizes and flush out the hidden magnificence inside. None of this goes effectively, after all.
Blichfeldt credit physique horror godfather David Cronenberg as an affect — how might she not? — although “The Ugly Stepsister” is extra physique horror in its formalism than spiritually when it comes to the style. The movie lacks Cronenberg’s pathos and brooding philosophical inquiry, extra within the floor of issues with out too deeply piercing them or abandoning too gaping a wound. Sequences of Elvira ravenous herself and obsessing over her weight bore the factors down like a drill, although the screenplay might do extra to discover the lead’s subjectivity and the way her self-lacerating pursuit of magnificence is changing into infectious to throughout her. Whilst a tapeworm is consuming her from the within out, and as Elvira ultimately, after all, succumbs to the worst potential technique to get her ft to suit into that pesky slipper.
The key-weapon character who makes the extra haunting impression is Agnes, whose chignon hides a rebellious spirit beneath — in addition to a furtive romance with the steady boy, Isak (Malte Gårdinger). What’s occurring inside her head? Blichfeldt solely provides us glimpses, however they’re sufficient to solid a chilling spell. All of the physique contortions, projectile tapeworm-vomiting, and severed toes apart, the movie’s shiveriest sequence follows Elvira into the stables the place she unintentionally (?) spies upon Agnes, bent over, ass up, and able to obtain Isak in the one manner that received’t besmirch her chastity. The sounds of horses bucking and huffing solely heighten the primal, animalistic vibes in a scene that smash-cuts to Agnes being brutally admonished by her new stepmother, spurring Agnes’ personal quiet struggle in opposition to Elvira.
The slow-burn setup (even regardless of punctuations of mad violence) all results in the requisite gala centerpiece, the place the quote-unquote new and improved Elvira is revealed to her potential Prince. Blichfeldt goes all out with the viscera whereas skimping on the soul, whilst “The Ugly Stepsister” does supply a path out for its (and all of its society’s) tortured ladies. The tyranny of an unscaleable magnificence hierarchy will without end be the impressed stuff of nice horror moviemaking. Whereas “The Ugly Stepsister” doesn’t go a lot deeper than Dr. Esthetique’s scalpel, the openly grotesque floor of the piece may simply be deep sufficient.
Grade: B-
“The Ugly Stepsister” premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Pageant. Shudder will launch the movie later within the 12 months.
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