Director: Emilie Blichfeldt Screenplay: Emilie Blichfeldt Cast: Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp, Flo Fagerli, Isac Calmroth Year: 2025
Fairy tales have been rewritten from a feminist angle many times, but few have done it with the physical brutality Emilie Blichfeldt brings to "The Ugly Stepsister", her debut as director and screenwriter. The premise sounds simple: tell Cinderella from one of the stepsisters' points of view. The execution is anything but simple. Blichfeldt turns the children's fable into a treatise on the literal price of trying to meet a standard of beauty that was never designed for you, and she does it without looking away when the price is paid in flesh and blood. It's also a reframing exercise: by putting us on the side of the traditional villain, the film forces us to ask why we considered her a villain in the first place.
In "The Ugly Stepsister" we follow Elvira (Lea Myren), a young woman who daydreams about falling in love with Prince Julian, the author of the romantic books that have obsessed her since childhood. Her mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) marries a wealthy widower of the realm on the promise of social ascent for both families, but when the man dies shortly after the wedding it becomes clear that the promise was mutual and neither side actually had anything. Rebekka loses the small inheritance she had brought with her to legal technicalities, and suddenly the only economic exit for her family is for Elvira to marry the prince. Elvira accepts the burden with a determination that starts as hope and gradually turns, procedure by procedure, into something much darker.
The sub-genre "The Ugly Stepsister" fits into is body horror with a social-critique payload, the same lineage Coralie Fargeat worked in "The Substance" and that Julia Ducournau has been exploring since "Raw" (2016) through "Titane" (2021). Blichfeldt engages that tradition and adds two layers of her own. The first is the period frame: the film takes place in an undefined past, with costume, set design and music placing it in a pre-industrial world, and that temporal distance is what lets her argue more forcefully that the problem isn't contemporary, it's constitutive. The second is the direct dialogue with Angela Carter and her lineage of reimagining classic tales through horror, a line to which "The Company of Wolves" (1984) by Neil Jordan also belongs. Blichfeldt adds what Carter couldn't always: the body as an explicit battlefield.
The first thing that impresses technically is the world-building. The cinematography combines a warm, richly saturated palette for the romantic-fantasy scenes Elvira imagines with harsh, clinical light for the procedures she submits herself to. Sound design accompanies that duality: the orchestral score inhabits the ball and salon sequences and disappears entirely in the moments where only the sound of the body matters. Costume, in addition to being period-authentic, is worked like armor, like constriction, like something the protagonist inhabits rather than wears. All these elements converge into a tone that feels controlled without ever seeming academic.
Lea Myren carries the film on her shoulders and delivers work that will be hard to forget. Elvira begins as a character you laugh at with affection, almost tender in her naivety, and ends as someone you can't look away from for very different reasons. Myren works the arc with a precision rare in a debut: each physical modification Elvira submits herself to comes with a small shift in how the character relates to the world, until the world itself starts reading her the way it always had and she stops recognizing that as a problem. Around her, Ane Dahl Torp builds Rebekka as the film's real moral engine, and Thea Sofie Loch Næss as Agnes rewrites everything you thought you knew about Cinderella.
What "The Ugly Stepsister" argues most clearly is that the prince isn't worth what's being paid for him. Blichfeldt has the instinct to show us Prince Julian in his daily life, and what we see is an absolutely unremarkable man, no particular virtues, no charm, whose only relevant quality is his position. The film dedicates as much time to that observation as to Elvira's mutilations, and it isn't an accident. The horror of the film isn't in the things Elvira does to herself; it's in the fact that she does them for someone who doesn't even deserve those things, and in the fact that the entire system pushing her toward those decisions operates without ever questioning the target.
One reservation the film invites is pacing. Blichfeldt takes her time, builds the characters patiently, and doesn't accelerate toward the horror until the emotional plot has done its prior work. Anyone arriving expecting body horror from the first act will experience the long first hour as a drama with strange accents; the explicit horror arrives in the final third and it arrives with force. For the viewer who values construction over immediate impact, that patience is what makes the impact weigh when it arrives. For the viewer looking for visceral efficiency, that same patience may be frustrating.
Fans of modern body horror, and especially anyone who enjoyed "The Substance", will find in "The Ugly Stepsister" a companion piece that works the same thesis from a different angle: the period one instead of the contemporary, the fable one instead of the entertainment-industry setting. Blichfeldt debuts with the kind of film that doesn't let itself be watched twice without altering the first impression, and that redefines what you thought you knew about a story that's been told for centuries. A debut like this in any year would be a surprise; in 2025 it's one of the most interesting things European horror has produced.
Rating: 8/10
Ending Explained (Spoilers below)
The real thesis of "The Ugly Stepsister" lives in the figure of Rebekka. The mother is the engine behind everything that happens in the film, though she almost never appears as a villain in the conventional sense. Rebekka doesn't hate her daughters, doesn't attack them directly, and yet she is the one who turns all three of them into pieces of economic negotiation. She demands Elvira transform into a sellable object; she excludes Agnes, the deceased husband's daughter, from the marriage market and treats her as a servant because she doesn't serve the plan; and she considers Alma, her other biological daughter, lost material from the start because she doesn't see her as capable of marrying well. Every mutilation Elvira performs is her own decision in appearance, but the frame in which the decision gets made is a frame Rebekka patiently built during her daughters' entire childhood. The visible physical violence is Elvira's against herself; the invisible structural violence is the mother's against all of them.
The modifications Elvira accumulates have a deliberate progression. She starts with the nose reconstruction, a procedure that even in its execution is more brutal than any modern cosmetic equivalent. She moves to swallowing a parasite for weight loss, which the film treats as if it were a period-era medical prescription and which gradually becomes the visually most unbearable scene in the film when the parasite, now adult and enormous, has to be extracted from her body. She has eyelashes from another source sewn into her own eyelids. And finally, when the prince tours the kingdom with the shoe looking for whoever it fits, Elvira cuts parts of her foot to force the fit. Each of these steps amplifies the critique: the ideal being reached for doesn't allow for cosmetic adjustments, it demands total re-engineering of the body, and that's exactly the point the film wants you to see.
The Cinderella reinterpretation Blichfeldt proposes isn't simply putting us on the stepsister's side. It's demonstrating that the story was always about the same problem, only told from the angle that made the message more comfortable. Agnes ends with the prince, yes, but the film makes clear that Agnes was also a victim of the same system, that her servitude and exclusion didn't happen because she was humble and good but because Rebekka strategically erased her. The Disney version made us believe kindness triumphs; the Blichfeldt version argues that in this system nobody triumphs, and that whoever we see triumph is being reserved the same trap a little further down the road.
The film's most devastating final gesture is the one Rebekka keeps for herself. With the plan of marrying Elvira to the prince having failed, without inheritance, without a husband, and with daughters she can no longer place on the marriage market, the mother takes up the very role she had been demanding the market do with her daughters: sustaining the household with her body. Rebekka begins operating as a prostitute, charging sexual favors for the money the family needs to survive. That shot closes the entire argument: the mother wasn't intervening in her daughters' lives out of misdirected love, she was running a business, and when the main product didn't sell in the ideal market she offered herself as the replacement. The horror of the revised fairy tale isn't only the price Elvira pays; it's that the same administrator of the system ends up paid by the system in the same currency she was demanding from her daughters.
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