Director/Screenplay – Emilie Blichfeldt, Producer – Maria Ekerhovd, Photography – Marcel Zyskind, Music – Kaada & Vilde Tuv, Visual Effects Supervisor – Peter Hjorth, Visual Effects – Rebel Unit (Supervisor – Theodor Flo-Groeneboom), TINT & XANF, Special Effects Supervisor – Tomasz Bykowski, Makeup Effects/Prosthetics – Thomas Foldberg, Production Design – Sabine Hvild & Klaudia Klimka-Bartczak. Production Company – Lava Films/Zentropa Sweden/Motor/Film I Väst/Mediefondet Zefyr/TINT/Uhørt/Microfilm/DR.
Cast
Lea Myren (Elvira von Rosenhoff), Thea Sofie Loch Næss (Agnes von Morgenstierne Munthe), Ane Dahl Torp (Rebekka von Rosenhoff), Flo Fagerli (Alma von Rosenhoff), Isac Calmroth (Prince Julian), Malte Myrenberg Gårdinger (Isak), Ralph Carlsson (Otto von Morgenstierne Munth), Cecilia Forss (Sophie von Kronenberg), Katarzyna Herman (Madam Vajna), Adam Lundgren (Dr Esthetique)
Plot
The teenage Elvira von Rosenhoff and her younger sister Alma join her mother Rebekka as she travels to marry Otto von Morgenstierne Munth. However, Otto collapses dead during the wedding feast. Elvira then discovers that when they thought her mother was marrying for money Otto’s estate is bankrupt. Prince Julian announces that he will be holding a ball to choose a wife in four months’ time. Rebekka pins all her hopes on this. Elvira and Otto’s daughter Agnes are sent to a finishing school, while Elvira undergoes surgeries and a complete physical makeover to make her a desirable catch.
The Ugly Stepsister was a feature-length directorial debut for Norwegian-born Emilie Blichfeldt who had previously made the basics as a ten-minute short film Stesøstra (2020). The film is a pan-Scandinavian production with financing from Norway, Sweden and Denmark, while being filmed in Poland with a cast that is Norwegian, Swedish and Polish.
The Ugly Stepsister is a dark adult take on Cinderella, a story that dates back to the 17th Century, although there are older versions going back to Greece in the First Century A.D., which holds the record as the most filmed story ever. Film versions range from the classic Disney animated Cinderella (1950) to the live-action remake Cinderella (2015) and assorted musical and ballet versions like The Glass Slipper (1955) and The Slipper and the Rose (1976) to modernisations like If the Shoe Fits (1990), the parody Ella Enchanted (2004) and the sex-reversed Jerry Lewis comedy Cinderfella (1950), even one of the early shorts from Georges Melies
Emilie Blichfeldt’s novel take is to tell the story of Cinderella through the eyes of one of the ugly stepsisters. It is an unusual take, least of all in that the film sets out to make said character sympathetic. Well, not exactly – Blichfeldt gives us a classic Ugly Duckling story where Elvira is plain and ordinary and then undergoes a severe transformation to make her into the swan. By dint of the fact that Elvira is the film’s identification character, our sympathies are with her during the extremes she experiences. Although by the end of the story, Elvira is no longer the sympathetic character she is at the outset and has morphed into the ugly stepsister we all know – in spades.
Mindedly, the Cinderella equivalent, Thea Sofie Loch Næss’s Agnes, is not exactly the sympathetic character she traditionally is. In the early scenes, Loch Næss comes across as bitchy and entitled. Her demotion to scullery maid comes after she is discovered screwing the stable boy (Malte Myrenberg Gårdinger) – a scene where Emilie Blichfeldt does not spare us full genital shots. This is also a version of Cinderella that downplays the traditional fantasy elements. The most we get is the fairy godmother (which is Agnes’s late mother appearing to her) and causing silkworms to appear and knit Agnes’s torn dress together again. Pumpkin coaches are mentioned but are not depicted, perhaps keeping with the film’s realistic approach or possibly for budgetary reasons.
Ugly Stepsister Elvira (Lea Myren) (l) and mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) (r0 as she readies Elvira’s physical makeover
Emilie Blichfeldt gives us a very nicely made film. There is not the lavishness of costuming and sets that many other versions of the story indulge in – everything here comes with a grounded realism rather than is designed as eye candy. Nor for that matter is The Ugly Stepsister quite the horror treatment of Cinderella it is being made out to be – unlike the recent horror versions on the story with Cinderella’s Curse (2024) and Cinderella’s Revenge (2024) – although it was released to the US Shudder network.
That said, Emilie Blichfeldt gives us plenty of focus on the grotesquerie of Lea Myren’s makeover – having her nose bone shattered with a chisel, her braces wrenched out with a set of giant-sized pliers, swallowing a tapeworm egg to lose weight and an especially hard to watch scene where her eyelids are pierced with a needle to have a set of fake eyelashes attached. The nastiest parts come near the end where Blichfeldt goes all out in giving us the ugly stepsister with Lea Myren with missing teeth, hair torn out and reduced to crawling. The severing of the stepsister’s toes is drawn out with a nastiness, although the most grotesque scene is the one where the tapeworm is pulled out of her mouth. I have seen The Ugly Stepsister referred to as a Body Horror film – that not a term I use on this site (due to its vagueness of description as a label), but am perfectly happy with it being so called in this instance.
You can see that Blichfeldt has turned The Ugly Stepsister into a commentary on the beauty standards that women are forced to endure. Even if it is one that the story’s sliding into a traditional Cinderella ending where the downtrodden scullery maid wins the prince by allowing her beauty to shine contravenes this – ie. for all Elvira’s transformation, neither this nor her natural self is accepted and it is Agnes who wins the prince with surely the end message that the naturally beautiful will win out and the ugly and downtrodden are better off not trying to rise above their lot on life.
Perhaps my only issue with this is the casting of Lea Myren as the ugly stepsister. Myren’s performance is fine; it is just that we are being told throughout that Elvira is fat and ugly – something Myren is not. She is made up to seem plain, while when we see her undressed, she has an extremely average looking woman’s body. You cannot help but think that the transformation would have been even more potent if Blichfeldt had cast a girl who was plus size at the outset and underwent a physical transformation for the part as the film progressed.
