The Ugly Stepsister Is the Most Disgusting Fairy Tale Ever Told

Feverishly funny, gruesomely gross and unrelenting in its satirical critique of both beauty standards and the designation of a cinematic “protagonist,” director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister is a film that will have jaws dropping at Sundance this year. A pitch black fairy tale reimagining of the story of Cinderella–conveniently premiering right before the 1950 Disney version of the tale celebrates its 75th anniversary–it reframes its story from the perspective of one of the titular “ugly” stepsisters, but then drives far beyond the idea of physical ugliness to get at the rotting sense of first sympathetic aspiration and later selfish entitlement and delusion that drives us toward our ultimate self destruction. And if there’s a more purely disgusting final five minutes in any other Sundance film in 2025, well … that would have to be a doozy, because The Ugly Stepsister delivers a denouement for the ages.

The central, titular character of the Norwegian language film is Elvira (Lea Myren), a friendly, budding but gawky teenager who dreams of meeting and marrying her country’s dashing, highly eligible Prince, whose personal book of published love poems she carries with her wherever she goes. At present, however, Elvira and her younger sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) have followed their striving mother (Ane Dahl Torp) as she marries a seemingly wealthy older man, gifting Elvira with a beautiful new stepsister, the enchanting but dismissive Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). Still, Elvira would likely have happily endured her new family’s teasing, being overwhelmed by the ornate beauty, excess and pageantry of their estate, had a wrench not been thrown into the gears: Immediately after the wedding, her new father in law drops dead, leaving Elvira’s mother desperate to maintain the luxurious life they had seemingly attained. Ah, and what of the gracious and charming Agnes, now lorded over by a stepmother she barely knows? Spoiler: It’s not long before they’re referring to the now sooty Agnes as “Cinderella.”

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What The Ugly Stepsister does so deftly is play with the audience’s inherent biases toward sympathy and self-awareness of their own behavior as reflected by a character. As the story begins, the framing of Elvira can’t help but make her the obvious, sympathetic audience proxy–her garish braces pinching and puffing up her smile as she desperately attempts to pass for one of the high society types around her, or simply evade their scorn. Agnes, in comparison, is a beautiful and spoiled brat who grew up in the lap of luxury, one whose welcoming facade is quickly shown to be mostly a device to hide not-so-secret derision. When the king’s messenger arrives to announce an upcoming ball where virgins of the country will vie for the hand of the Prince, she haughtily declares herself as “Agnes Angelica Alicia Victoria von Morgenstierne Munthe of Rosenhoff.” Elvira, on the other hand, gets jotted down as “Elvira … Stepsister.”

Thus begins The Ugly Stepsister’s quest to invert its characters, primarily through the increasingly manic stepmother’s iron-willed determination to craft her daughter Elvira into an object that can win the Prince’s heart (or gaze), regardless of the physical and psychological toll to the young woman. That’s how Elvira ends up sitting in a dentist’s chair, staring up at the razor-sharp chisel positioned just below her eyes, waiting for the hammer strike to violently reshape her bulbous nose. Anesthesia? Nope, not in this setting. She’s left wearing a nose brace that evokes a dog muzzle, like some Hannibal Lecter-esque device that is all that stands between us and the specter of her hideous beak escaping from her face to menace the countryside. “Beauty is pain,” reads a sign in the questionable surgeon’s office. So is having a mother ready to sacrifice you on the altar of upward mobility.

Steadily, the two stepsisters diverge. Elvira is the underdog to win the Prince’s heart, lacking Agnes’ natural gifts, but is utterly committed to a delusional quest to better herself and achieve beauty. Lea Myren sells her descent into madness beautifully, channeling no recent performance quite so much as Mia Goth’s jittery trifecta across Ti West’s X, Pearl and Maxxxine. Her commitment to the role echoes that of the character as Elvira sacrifices her soul for a falsely promised dream. Agnes, meanwhile, is made to learn humility and becomes a cast-off afterthought in the household, abhorred by the stepmother who won’t even consent to have her rotting father properly buried. A sympathy inversion ensues: In whom do we see ourselves, and who will emerge victorious? The now downtrodden Agnes, or the determined but increasingly unhinged Elvira, who has become a vessel for her mother’s mania?

There will be those who question the categorization of The Ugly Stepsister as a horror film in the course of watching it, particularly around the halfway point. To a certain point, it disguises itself as largely a black comedy of manners, a fanciful combination of the absurdist aesthetics of Yorgos Lanthimos with the enraged feminism and class commentary of Emerald Fennell. Its anachronistic soundtrack, blending synths and keys with traditional instrumentation, unmoors it from any concrete time and space, placing it into some kind of dreamy and surreal place between reality and a fairy tale realm. But oh, once the truly horrific imagery arrives, you’d better believe it makes its presence felt. The end result becomes a film that would be patently impossible to release in U.S. theaters without an NC-17 rating, if the MPA were to rate it–not with the parade of body parts, blood and body fluids eventually on display. If the film has any theatrical appearances at all beyond its eventual arrival streaming on Shudder, you can rest assured that it will be unrated.

With that said, The Ugly Stepsister isn’t the sort of horror film making any particular attempt to scare its audience. This is horror in the purer sense of the word; an embrace of revulsion as Elvira embarks on her ever more desperate and pathetic maneuvers to improve herself, completely unaccepting of the possibility of failure. Of course her rash decisions begin to rebound in unforeseen ways, leaving her eventually falling apart at the seams much like Margaret Qualley’s Sue in the third act of The Substance. As in Coralie Fargeat’s now Oscar-nominated film, everything that is given here can just as easily be taken away, and it’s the understatement of the year to observe that Elvira eventually receives a karmic payoff of biblical proportions. But even if they’re prepared for it, that won’t keep some of the imagery from living in the nightmares of viewers for years to come.

The Ugly Stepsister is an audacious debut for Blichfeldt as a writer-director, a beautifully captured and often quite funny piece of feminist social satire that builds to a conclusion of grand guignol that will likely leave some of its more squeamish audience members running for the aisles. Suffice to say, it’s the first iteration of Cinderella where one might want to be equipped with a barf bag for viewing, and if that’s not an apt sentiment for 2025, I can’t imagine what would be.

Director: Emilie Blichfeldt
Writer: Emilie Blichfeldt
Stars: Lea Myren, Thea Sofie-Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp, Flo Fagerli, Isac Calmroth, Malte Gardinger
Release date: Jan. 23, 2025 (Sundance, followed by Shudder in 2025)

Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister Is the Most Disgusting Fairy Tale Ever Told