The Ugly Stepsister is directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, and the cast includes Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp, and Flo Fagerli.
My Thoughts On The Ugly Stepsister
The Ugly Stepsister isn’t your average fairy tale subversion, 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 - she’s rendered human, heartbreakingly so, and played with astonishing sensitivity and restraint by Lea Myren, who is aching to be seen.
She enters the story with a flicker of hope, a flicker that dims as she's plunged into a social hierarchy where beauty is the only currency that counts.
The plot itself looesly follows the bones of the classic Cinderella story, but every beat here is warped.
When Elvira’s family moves in with a wealthy suitor and his daughter Agnes (a pitch-perfect performance by Flo Fagerli, all icy detachment and effortless allure), things immediately begin to sour when 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, where 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 does actually serves a 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.
And this is where the film’s commentary lands hardest.
Elvira’s journey is not so much about redemption or revenge, but more about erasure, where 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, where she is slow, quiet, and very believable.
The Ugly Stepsister looks great too, with the production design drawing from fairy tale iconography, and everything looks like it was once beautiful but has since rotted.
And while the body horror may be the film’s most immediate hook to many, its staying power lies in its cultural critique, as it isn’t content to simply gross you out, it wants to implicate you, and Elvira’s story feels both ancient and painfully contemporary, where her transformation isn’t an anomaly, it’s a mirror.
The Ugly Stepsister offers a challenging, visceral, and disturbingly relevant horror experience.