Review: The Ugly Stepsister

Director:  Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt

Stars:  Lea Myren, Flo Fagerli, Ane Dahl Torp

Cinderella stories crop-up in cultures across the globe; a strangely persistent folk tale so old that its origins are knotted and maybe even unknowable. Written variants spring from Germany, Greece and Italy, but oral traditions date back further, to Egypt. In modern times, Disney’s codification of the story has imprinted western audiences with hyper-specific imagery, but retellings persist outside of even the corporate giant’s live action revisionism. Here, new to Shudder and rumbling on Sundance word-of-mouth for its explicit content, comes a dark and sartorial Norwegian extrapolation, which skews the material into the excessive realms of gratuity, like a bastard fairy tale version of mid ’00s torture porn.

As the title implies, director Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt reframes the classic tale from the perspective of Elvira (Lea Myren), one of two sisters suddenly of age and in contention for a rich suitor. Following the sudden death of their father and the discovery that the family’s wealth has been squandered, the girls’ grieving mother Rebekka (Ana Dahl Torp) adjudicates that Elvira is not conventionally attractive enough, taking severe steps to improve her eligibility for marrying into money.

Blichfeldt quickly places the metrics of beauty in the eyes of opportunist proto-plastic surgeon Dr. Esthétique (Adam Lundgren), (that character name ought to key you in to the level of tongue-in-cheek, ahem, ‘subtlety’ favoured here), but they are standards held up by the broader matriarchal society depicted. Elvira attends Cotillion classes intended to train young women of a certain class to comport themselves in ways designed to be perceived as agreeable. Matriarchy in thrall and service of patriarchy. The girls in the class are prospective matches for the dreamy (and vacant) Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). While not entirely as unforgivingly lurid as Coralie Fagreat’s The Substance, The Ugly Stepsister is as gleeful with its sledgehammer body horror theatrics and about as mean-spirited toward its central figures, never missing an opportunity to mock or shame them for being slaves to societal norms. 

Elvira chides herself for being ugly and fat; standards that don’t actually apply (Myren is quite conventionally attractive as is the norm for feature casting), but which speak to the ways in which women are taught to compare and compete unfavourably to a set of imposed, ephemeral and inconsistent standards (men too, btw, but we’re not the focus here, lads). This being a period piece, Elvira doesn’t have reckless diet pills at her disposal, but she’s not above deliberately swallowing a tapeworm egg in an effort to stymie her perceived weight gain. Again such lengths are presented with an air of disquieting mocking. We’re not encouraged to feel sorry for Elvira’s plight as we come at it from a vantage of knowing better. She’s depicted, repeatedly, as something of a misguided fool. Blichfeldt often feels uncomfortably ‘above’ her subjects, their discomfort somehow deserved.

The imagery is appreciably desirous and vaginal at times; one woodland sequence sees Elvira dash through a labia-like rock formation in an effort to spy on the local lads, and her daydreams of young men swoon through pink and crimson filters evoking a bodily sense of overwhelming desire. Blichfeldt putting the hot into hot-pinks. Wobbling erect members and gloopy semen spill across the frame as Elvira spies on her sister’s stable rutting with an expression equal parts excited and horrified. The world of sexual discovery is rendered both icky and intoxicating.

Dr. Esthétique’s business motto is Beauty is Pain, which amounts to the manifesto Blichfeldt brings to bare with her gamely stomach-churning movie. Fishhooks find eyes, feet get mutilated, all in service of placating social standards that are the ultimate folly of all. In hundreds of years, Blichfeldt argues, we’ve not learned anything. Or, rather, we’ve known better all along but have been pressured into going against nature rather than brave rejecting the status quo. The failings presented here, it suggests, are therefore the characters’ own and thus no sympathy is particularly afforded anyone. And while individualism is eventually learned, it’s a rather jaded journey.

The film finds itself in an all-too-rare rapturous mode when it presents Elvira’s dance of enticement before Julian as an open love-letter to Busby Berkeley. A truly unlikely occurrence given the rest of the picture, but at least a sign that Blichfeldt’s aspirations and influences may be more versatile than first appears. 

The Ugly Stepsister is undoubtedly pretty when assessed from a technical standpoint. Cinematography, hair, make-up and above all costumes are to die for, while John Erik Kaada and Vilde Tuv’s tremulous music gurgles beneath all like the score to The Shining; an aural evocation of Elvira’s coiling, all-consuming tapeworm. But, for all it’s accomplishments – be they icky or inviting – The Ugly Stepsister’s heart doesn’t quite feel as though its in the right place. Surface level horror hounds may be in hog’s heaven, but even shallow cuts beneath the skin reveal a naggingly gross and condescending picture. In other words, a true Cinderella story.