“Cinderella, but make it body horror” might sound like an unflattering description, considering the recent trend of greedy, but very mediocre, horror movies that adapt fairy tales. However, The Ugly Stepsister (Den Stygge Stesøsteren, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Denmark, 2025) is much more than just an adaptation to make a quick buck with some cheap scares. And it is precisely because of how much it has to say about the very tale that inspires it.
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By extension, the feature film debut of director and screenwriter Emilie Blichfeldt is also an acid satire of the internalized misogyny in so many similar stories, which perpetuate beauty ideals as exaggerated as they are outright harmful and violent. It is, therefore, a film more closely related aesthetically, thematically and tonally to The Substance (France, United States and United Kingdom, 2024), the previous year’s body horror success.
What’s it about?
Widow Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) has two daughters: Elvira (Lea Myren) and Alma (Flo Fagerli). Believing he has money, she marries an old widower, Otto (Ralph Carlsson), who has a beautiful daughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). However, when he dies suddenly, she discovers they are bankrupt and her dreams of wealth vanish.
Resentment grows as Agnes scorns Rebekka and her stepsisters for not coming from high society. Meanwhile, to improve the family finances, the stepmother plans to marry Elvira off to Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), who has called for a ball throughout the kingdom. Although Elvira is obsessed with the idea of marrying the prince, her mother knows she has no chance, especially compared to Agnes, so she subjects her to a series of increasingly brutal treatments and cosmetic surgeries to make her a beautiful and graceful woman.
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The Ugly Stepsister illustrates all the systemic pressures of being a woman
The greatness of both horror cinema and fairy tales lies in their flexibility to address certain issues in the form of allegory or subtext subtly masked in fantasy. Except that Blichfeldt has the subtlety of a chisel and hammer blow straight to the nose. What in other hands would be cause for complaint is a compliment in this case.
Yes, The Ugly Stepsister is blunt in its criticism of the beauty industry and the arbitrariness of its standards, which while consisting of suffocating corsets, refinement schools, painful treatments and other self-inflicted monstrosities in the film’s world; could very well translate to the fasting diets, semaglutide treatments and TikTok aesthetic aspirationism of our era.
However, the interesting thing is that Blichfeldt doesn’t stay on the surface, but understands these vices as part of a systemic misogyny in which these beauty patterns are a symptom of a bigger disease where factors such as economic independence (or its impossibility thereof), sexual morality and their intertwined hypocrisies converge. What greater horror than subjecting one’s own body to the random whims of male desire, the only way to escape assured misery—or, worse yet, giving that way out to someone else?
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That horror, here, becomes real and tangible in the protagonist’s body, who, finding no greater value in herself than as a family bargaining chip or as a prospective submissive wife, abandons herself to the mandates of the “market.”
The director, together with her cinematographer Marcel Zyskind and her production and art designers, Sabine Hviid and Klaudia Klimka; finds a delicate balance between the elegance of a period drama and the horror of bodily transformation in its most abject and bloody forms.
The entire ensemble is skillfully traversed by a sense of satirical humor that crosses a point of no return: everything is laughs and fun until that abandonment becomes images that make it difficult to keep looking at the screen. And successfully achieving such an act of balance makes Blichfeldt a filmmaker we should keep an eye on.
Find out where The Ugly Stepsister is available to watch now.
