Emelie Blichfeldt‘s gleefully gory and giddily fun The Ugly Stepsister doesn’t so much as subvert the now-standard Disneyfied approach to fairy tales so much as reconnect with the original Grimm, Gothic nastiness, while shifting their traditional focus elsewhere in a similar way to Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber. While nowhere near as erudite and thematically rich as Carter’s reworkings, it foregrounds the blood and sex and pain of it all in a very frank, drolly Scandinavian way.

The Ugly Stepsister, as the title suggests, revises the Cinderella story from the perspective of one of the stepsisters. Elvira (Lea Myren) is a sweet, shy girl who is nevertheless determined to marry the dashing prince. She’s pretty, but lacks the natural poise, grace, and beauty of Agnes (Thea-Sofie Loch Næss). When she gets the invite to the story’s pivotal ball, her scheming mother (Ane Dahl Torp) twists the girl’s innocent longing in horrific ways, determined to mould her into the perfect vessel to capture the prince and restore the family’s fortune.

Visually stunning with its balance between moments of magic and squirming body horror, The Ugly Stepsister lays bare the rotten heart of the fairy tale, but shows just enough flawless skin to demonstrate why those fantasies endure. Beauty is pain here, a regime of primitive hammer and chisel nose jobs and tapeworm diets. Lea Myren is sensational as Elvira, almost literally sculpted into the girl she thinks she should be. She’s an empathetic figure who maintains a sense of innocence even as she gets more and more unhinged and the physical demands of the role increase. Loch Næss is a strong foil as Agnes, the film’s Cinderella. Ethereal with an edge and an earthy sexual appetite she’s also a deviation from the story’s standard heroine.

Blichfeldt’s take on the fairy tale isn’t exactly subtle. Its messaging about the annihilating effects of ludicrous beauty standards is as surface-level as the purely aesthetic value placed on its brutalised heroine. Still, the near discarding of subtext didn’t stop The Substance making waves last year, and The Ugly Stepsister aims to both entertain and repulse in a similar way and largely succeeds.

It’s far from didactic, yet it’s guilty of coming across as a little mean-spirited as poor Elvira is subject to increasingly excruciating indignities played out as black comedy. It feels like she’s punished for nothing more than wholeheartedly buying into the very system that chews her up and spits her out. Elvira may be guilty of naivete and an almost sociopathic monomania, but she’s a figure of almost agonising pathos.

The Ugly Stepsister is unrelenting in its approach to the Cinderella story. As the structure of the story is so well known, Emelie Blichfeldt is free to focus on character and its this that is the movie’s strongest suit. A straight, if bloody, retelling would work but wouldn’t be half as memorable without the time spent on making Elvira such a textured protagonist. Stylish enough to instantly grab the attention and so inventively nasty that it hammer and chisels itself into the memory, it’s a phenomenally confident debut from Blichfeldt and – assuming its release to streaming doesn’t get it buried amidst tonnes of more disposable ‘content’ – it could easily become a cult classic.

Streaming on Shudder from Fri 18 Apr 2025