‘The Ugly Stepsister’ Review: Cinderella as Gothic Body Horror
Seemingly plain but ambitious Elvira is pushed by her mother to win over a vain prince and save their family. But when her stunning stepsister Agnes becomes a rival, Elvira is driven to extremes.
Every villain in someone else’s story is the hero of their own. You don’t have to look very far to see it: it happens every day, it’s there in the news. The people one side sees as grotesque, sinister, and indefensible—almost cartoonish villains—are viewed by others as heroic, noble, even brave. And the reverse is just as true. Point of view defines character; it shapes who these people are allowed to be. In fairy tales—or in classical stories that rely on that structure, with a clear division between good and evil—those roles are usually fixed. But what happens when the story is told by the villain? Or by a secondary character we’ve only ever seen one way, and who is suddenly revealed from another angle?
The Ugly Stepsister takes a sideways approach to Cinderella. This is not the familiar story of the sweet, kind, long-suffering heroine, but the tale of her stepsister—the older of the two daughters of her father’s new wife, the ones who take over the household and reduce Cinderella to a servant. Everything begins with a fundamental misunderstanding. Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), a widow, marries another widower, Otto. Each assumes the other has money; in reality, neither does. When Otto dies suddenly, Rebekka decides that her daughters have to “save” her financially. That, however, will not be easy—especially since neither of them seems to possess what, at least at the time, was required to secure that kind of future.
The younger daughter, Alma (Flo Fagerli), is still a child. The elder, Elvira (Lea Myren), is—by the standards of the era—not conventionally attractive: she has a prominent nose, oversized braces, excess weight, and very little grace. Elvira is not what anyone would call beautiful, but she is obsessed with marrying the blond, vain Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). And she will do whatever it takes to win him over. If that means a combination of relentless physical and cosmetic procedures, so be it. Everything is sacrificed in pursuit of the prize.
Caught in the middle is Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the Cinderella of this version, relegated to domestic labor. Unlike the classic fairy tale heroine, she is not especially meek or obliging. On the contrary, she makes her irritation with her stepmother and stepsister quite clear—and she is also involved in a fairly torrid romance with the boy who works in the stables. When the king’s invitation arrives for the ball where the prince will choose a bride, both young women sign up. But the film does not follow Agnes. It follows Elvira, as she embarks on a series of “treatments” that include cosmetic surgery, dangerous dietary manipulations, and other extreme measures designed to make her beautiful in the prince’s eyes—an ordeal that is neither easy to endure nor easy to watch.
Combining this fresh angle on a classic fairy tale with a conflict closer to The Substance—the pressure of the “market” to be beautiful and what women are willing to do to meet that demand—this Norwegian film gradually shifts from drama to suspense and finally into full-blown gothic horror. With personal sacrifice and the dubious assistance of her mother, Elvira becomes increasingly aligned with classical ideals of beauty, even if reaching that point involves high-risk physical alterations. Yet the threat posed by the more naturally attractive Agnes never disappears.
Director Emilie Blichfeldt does not flip the characters upside down in relation to the original story. Elvira is not turned into a straightforward heroine, nor is Cinderella recast as a villain. Instead, the film fills the space between them with shades of gray. Both women are complicated, driven by desires and riddled with contradictions. Many of those impulses are understandable within their own logic and within the social context they inhabit. Perhaps Rebekka, the mother/stepmother, is the only character who retains more overtly brutal traits—but one could easily imagine another film told from her point of view, one that would make her motivations and behavior easier to comprehend.
There is also a feminist reading of Den stygge stesøsteren (the film’s original Norwegian title), though not only the obvious one that frames these women as victims of a harsh patriarchal system that forces them into competition with one another. The film also critiques the internal logic of the original fairy tale itself, and the cruelty it inflicts on Cinderella’s stepsisters. Blichfeldt places all these women on equal footing, showing them subject to the same desires, needs, and pressures generated by their environment. Each responds in her own way, doing what she knows how to do—or what she is capable of doing—to survive.
The Ugly Stepsister may not possess the traditional markers of a horror film, but almost without realizing it, Blichfeldt traps us inside a house—and a mindset—filled with horrifying behaviors and attitudes, many of them tied to extreme ideas about the body. Neither Perrault nor the Brothers Grimm, nor any of the other contributors to Cinderella across the centuries, imagined anything like the physical tortures endured by the protagonist of this version. From now on, it is hard to imagine returning to the old stories and reading them in quite the same way again.
