The Ugly Stepsister is directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, and the cast includes Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp, and Flo Fagerli.
The Ugly Stepsister isn’t your average fairy tale subversion. This isn’t revisionist fantasy where villains are reimagined with backstories and nuance. No, this is Cinderella as filtered through a body horror lens, which is gruesome, intimate, and psychologically unrelenting.
Director Emilie Blichfeldt doesn’t just deconstruct the mythos of the fairy tale, they disembowel it, stitch it back together with surgical thread, and let it bleed out across the frame.
At the film’s center is Elvira, one of the titular stepsisters, but not the cruel caricature we've been conditioned to despise. Instead, she’s rendered human, heartbreakingly so. Played with astonishing sensitivity and restraint by Lea Myren, Elvira is poor, passive, and aching to be seen.
She enters the story with a flicker of hope, a flicker that dims rapidly as she's plunged into a brutal social hierarchy where beauty is the only currency that counts.
The plot loosely follows the bones of the classic Cinderella story, but every beat is warped. When Elvira’s family moves in with a wealthy suitor and his flawless daughter Agnes (a pitch-perfect performance by Flo Fagerli, all icy detachment and effortless allure), things immediately begin to sour. The stepfather dies almost instantly, leaving behind a vacuum of power and affection, and from there, the story descends into madness.
Where traditional fairy tales revolve around magical transformation, The Ugly Stepsister substitutes that magic with invasive cosmetic procedures, each more horrific than the last. The mother, consumed by the toxic ambition to remake Elvira into a prince-worthy bride, orchestrates a series of mutilations that are genuinely difficult to watch.
The body horror here is not stylized or fantastical, it’s tactile, painful, and grounded in the grotesque reality of contemporary beauty culture. But yet, the gore serves a thematic purpose, and these aren’t shock sequences for the sake of it, they’re acts of psychological violence rendered physical. Each needle and incision underscores the film’s central concern of how societal pressures regarding beauty systematically disfigure women, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually.
This is where the film’s commentary lands hardest. Elvira’s journey isn’t about redemption or revenge, it’s about erasure. She begins as a full person, one with flaws, tenderness, and dreams, but as the film progresses, she is hollowed out by her mother’s ambition, and by a prince who values surfaces over substance.
Myren’s performance is devastatingly effective in capturing this descent, and she doesn’t play Elvira’s unraveling with melodrama. Instead, it’s slow, quiet, and very believable. Her arc is less about becoming someone else and more about vanishing entirely.
Visually, the film is stunning. Production design draws from fairy tale iconography but dirties it, and everything looks like it was once beautiful but has since rotted. The color grading leans cold and lifeless, underscoring the thematic lifeblood of the film
The score complements the visuals rather than overpowering them, using restrained motifs and silences to amplify the tension. There's a discomforting stillness in many scenes, a refusal to let the audience breathe.
And while body horror may be the film’s most immediate hook, its staying power lies in its cultural critique. The Ugly Stepsister isn’t content to simply gross you out, it wants to implicate you, and Elvira’s story feels both ancient and painfully contemporary, and her transformation isn’t an anomaly, it’s a mirror.
This is not a film for the faint of heart, but for those willing to sit with its discomfort, The Ugly Stepsister offers a challenging, visceral, and disturbingly relevant horror experience. It’s about what we do to women in the name of beauty. It’s about what women do to themselves to be loved. And it’s about how fairy tales, those sanitized stories we’ve grown up with, have always had blood on their hands.
We just haven’t looked closely enough.