Movies

The Ugly Stepsister (2025) | Review

Ever wondered what would happen if “Cinderella” got a blood transfusion from David Cronenberg? Wonder no more! Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt’s “The Ugly Stepsister” takes Disney’s sanitized fairy tales and drags them kicking and screaming back to their Grimm origins—emphasis on the grim.

This Sundance Midnight section gem flips the script faster than a plastic surgeon flips noses, centering on Elvira (Lea Myren)—a pig-nosed, pastry-loving stepsister who’d make medieval portrait painters swoon but has modern beauty standards giving her the botoxed raised eyebrow. Her romantic obsession is Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), a poetry-writing royal whose personality has all the depth of a puddle in the Sahara but is indeed on the hunt for his princess.

Meanwhile, traditional Cinderella stand-in Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) is reimagined as a mean-girl nightmare with a stable boy fetish. She might be conventionally gorgeous, but her personality makes her the “ugly stepsister.” Talk about beauty being only skin deep.

What follows is a delirious descent into body horror that makes the less-likeable “The Substance” look like a spa day. Elvira’s transformation involves a medieval orthodontist ripping out braces, nose-smashing with chisels, and—my personal favorite—the voluntary ingestion of a tapeworm for weight loss. Nothing says “fairy tale romance” quite like intestinal parasites, am I right?

Blichfeldt crafts visuals so sumptuous you’ll be gasping in delight right before gagging in disgust. The production design deserves awards, even as clumps of hair fall from Elvira’s scalp and that tapeworm plots its dramatic third-act reveal. It’s like watching Marie Antoinette’s palace decorated by Clive Barker—gorgeous and grotesque in equal measure.

The film’s costume department works overtime, creating period-perfect gowns that would make Bridgerton blush with envy, only to splatter them with bodily fluids that would make Cronenberg stand up and slow clap. Every frame is a painterly masterpiece worthy of hanging in the Louvre—the cinematography captures golden-hour light filtering through castle windows with the same loving attention it gives to the sheen of surgical instruments about to commit atrocities against human flesh.

Doctor Esthétique’s traveling beauty parlor of horrors is a production designer’s fever dream—part Victorian medical theater, part medieval torture chamber, with just a dash of macabre carnival sideshow. You’ll find yourself marveling at the ornate detail on his brass instruments seconds before they’re plunged into someone’s face. Meanwhile, the banquet scenes feature pastries so exquisitely crafted you can practically taste them—right before that tapeworm makes its grand, slithering entrance that will have you swearing off dessert for months.

The film’s message about impossible beauty standards hits harder than Dr. Esthétique’s nose-breaking chisel. As Elvira’s mentor beams that she’s “changing your outside to fit what you know is on the inside,” we can’t help but cringe at the raw, bleeding truth beneath the bandages.

Blichfeldt doesn’t just dip her toe into social commentary; she does a cannonball into the deep end of our beauty-obsessed culture. Every “improvement” inflicted on Elvira’s body is a middle finger to Instagram filters and the Kardashian empire. The tapeworm diet sequence delivers more savage commentary on weight-loss culture than a thousand think pieces ever could. It’s body horror with a purpose, forcing us to confront our complicity in these destructive ideals while simultaneously entertaining us with the grotesque spectacle.

When Elvira stares in the mirror post-surgery, her face a Frankenstein’s monster of societal expectations, the film lands its most devastating blow: we recognize ourselves in her desperate desire for acceptance. The kingdom’s beauty standards differ from ours only in their medieval methodology, not their psychological brutality. Prince Julian’s shallow poetry about feminine ideals could be copied and pasted from any modern dating app bio, proving that male mediocrity paired with impossible female beauty standards is history’s most enduring fairy tale. Blichfeldt doesn’t just break the glass slipper; she grinds it into dust and makes us watch as Elvira swallows the shards in the name of transformation.

By the time Elvira’s stomach starts making noises that would frighten a Foley artist, you’ll find yourself in the bizarre position of simultaneously rooting for her success while hoping her beauty quest spectacularly implodes. That’s the magic of “The Ugly Stepsister”—it makes you complicit in its critique.

“The Ugly Stepsister” serves up the fairy tale remix we deserve: a deliciously wicked, stomach-churning spectacle that proves the unfairest of them all aren’t stepmothers, but the beauty standards that keep us all imprisoned. Bring popcorn… but maybe skip the butter.

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