“Cinderella” is a tale as old as time (that’s a line from a different fairytale, but you catch my drift).
The Disneyfied version we know today is mostly based on Charles Perrault’s 17th century story, which includes the classic “Cinderella” signifiers – the pumpkin, the fairy godmother, the glass slippers. But one of the other well-known versions of the story comes from the twisted minds of folklore enthusiasts Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm – better known as the Brothers Grimm.
That iteration is probably a little more grisly than you remember. We won’t get into all the gory details, but when the prince in the Brothers Grimm version shows up to test the lost slipper on all the women living in Cinderella’s house, one stepsister cuts off her toes in order to ensure that the slipper fits. The other shaves off part of her heel.
It’s a sign of the sisters’ vanity and trickery, one which they are punished for while Cinderella is rewarded for her purity. But the Brothers Grimm failed to consider perhaps the most important question that this plot point raises: what on God’s green earth would possess a woman to mutilate her foot in order to fit a damn shoe?
“The Ugly Stepsister,” the directorial debut from Emilie Blichfeldt, is more interested in that question than any other iteration of the tale prior, answering it by way of a body horror extravaganza that will test your endurance of that genre by its end. Blichfeldt’s eye for grossness is undeniably compelling, and her examination of the reasons why women put themselves through the ringer in the name of beauty is more nuanced than the splatter of the film’s gore might lead you to believe.
Instead of following Cinderella – named Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) here – our protagonist is the titular stepsister herself, Elvira (Lea Myren). The two girls are drawn together when Elvira’s mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) marries Agnes’ father. But, after Agnes’ father dies on his wedding night, Rebekka learns that he was penniless, leaving the entire family destitute. Rebekka schemes to marry Elvira off to the highest bidder – preferably, Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) – but deems Elvira in need of some cosmetic changes before she can make that happen.
Anyone reading this who has ever engaged in some sort of new-fangled method to improve a perceived physical failing of their own knows there is nothing more ripe for body horror than the beauty industry. The practical effects in “The Ugly Stepsister” are distressingly gross, from the act of sewing fake eyelashes through Elvira’s lids to a tapeworm effect that genuinely made me want to vomit (there’s also, incredibly, a shot of Cinderella’s butthole – this is not your grandmother’s fairytale).
Part of why “The Ugly Stepsister” works so well is Blichfeldt’s ability to funnel a comprehensive exploration of why women put themselves through these hardships in the name of beauty in a disgusting, bloody mess of a film. It’s patriarchal in nature, yes – Elvira’s main motivation is that she loves Prince Julian (despite having never met him), and will do anything to make him hers. But the film also puts so much emphasis on women’s relationships with each other, and how those relationships often factor into toxic standards surrounding beauty. In some ways, Elvira is changing her body for a man, but she’s also changing it for the love of her mother, to appease the women who run the finishing school she attends, out of her jealousy of Agnes – all of these motivations bleed together and swirl into one.
If there’s any critique to make of “The Ugly Stepsister,” it’s that Elvira – while played well by the remarkably game Myren – is less interesting than many of the film’s other female characters. The other stepsister, Alma (Flo Fagerli), is the one woman in the film who seems completely comfortable in her own skin, and Agnes in particular offers the most compelling take on Cinderella in recent memory. The film frames her desire for the prince not in a romantic light, but a strategic one – a way to escape her circumstances rather than genuine interest. She’s far more cunning, and sometimes even cruel, in this version of the story than she’s ever been before.
“The Ugly Stepsister” is upsetting and often quite funny in its execution of horror, but Blichfeldt doesn’t throw you into the deep end right away. Rather, she lets the visceral, squelchy terror grow to a crescendo. After Elvira swallows a tapeworm egg in an effort to lose weight, the sound design in almost every subsequent scene is characterized by the loud gurgle of her stomach, tension slowly rising as the audience waits for whatever that explosion might entail. The very first time Elvira attempts to change her appearance, she pops a zit on her nose – a normal, everyday occurrence. But the inordinate amount of pus that leaves that pore foreshadows something much, much worse that will come out of a different hole towards the film’s end, the film’s trajectory creeping from the parts of the beauty enhancement experience we find normal to the ones that are completely horrifying.
That’s perhaps the most upsetting part of “The Ugly Stepsister;” that everything Elvira does in the name of beauty – a nose job, permanent eyelash extensions, an unsafe diet – are tactics that are still marketed to women today. As much as we might cringe at the brutality of a doctor breaking Elvira’s nose in order to set it differently, over 350,000 people in the United States do this every year when they get a nose job. Ozempic, a drug for type 2 diabetes, has turned into a weight loss plan. “The Ugly Stepsister” might be based on a fairytale, but the lengths to which Elvira goes in the name of beauty are not the fantastic bits. We still do the same things today. We’re just not as medieval.
