By Ziggy Himsworth, Second Year English
Thanks to Watershed, I got to catch Emilie Blichfeldt’s 2025 The Ugly Stepsister (Den Stygge Stesøsteren) before it's theatrical release. This film is the bloody answer to the question that gnaws back at you from the mirror: how much discomfort, how much pain can I stand to inflict upon myself, to escape this body that I’m tethered to?
The Cinderella tale, to my mind, was always meant to be a body-horror. It is about beauty given at birth and taken in jealousy, and the pressures of marriage, sexuality, and virginity that turn women to the violent hatred of their skin. In fact, the Grimm fairy tale is already so disturbing that Blichfeldt’s adaptation had no choice but to be worse.
The Ugly Stepsister is the story of Elvira (Lea Myren), who must marry for money, but is unappealing, unattractive. She wears tight ringlets, just like in the Disney animation, and thick metal braces. She is fat, or is told she is fat, and obscured by the grace of her stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). At times the film could be an awkward coming-of-age comedy—Elvira fantasises in hazy pastels of her prince whisking her away, John Erik Kadda’s score is nostalgically electronic and ambient. The dancing sequence is a dreamy vision of romance, the slow, floating choreography similar in tone to ‘Beauty School Dropout’ from Grease.
But the colours fade quickly, the fairy tale becomes mangled, and under the instruction of her mother Elvira undergoes increasingly twisted cosmetic procedures in preparation for Prince Julian’s ball.
She squeezes a spot on her nose, the pus is yellowish, worm-like. The audience wince, and someone behind me says ‘Guys, it’s only going to get worse...’ An aesthetician smashes her face in with a Victorian surgical instrument, and her scream is guttural. This film features some incredible screaming. My favourite is when Alma (Flo Fagerli), Elvira's sister, wakes up to blood-stained sheets. The idea of menstruation as body horror can be jarring—I haven’t necessarily enjoyed all the depictions of period blood as repulsive, but here it seems truthful. Alma is to suffer as Elvira suffers, because she is now of marriageable age.
The imagery is so gorgeous, so gross, I couldn’t look away, though I wanted to. Cake is smeared on Elvira’s face, blood on her stepfather’s. His body is left on the dining room table to rot. He is surrounded by wildflowers and eaten by maggots. He becomes bloated, decomposed, he turns strange colours. Cinderella lies on the blue dress by his feet. Elvira bathes in the dark, gorges herself on spaghetti, so hastily that some falls into the water. She runs her hand through her hair, it comes out in clumps and falls into the spaghetti too.
Blichfeldt's version of The Matrix red pill is the tapeworm egg. She is told ‘It’s what’s inside that counts’, she makes the decision to swallow it herself. It grows and grows inside her, eats her up, makes her binge eat cakes, makes her stomach groan. Everyone in the cinema cringes at the noises. We know it must come out eventually, but we don’t know when, or how.
The sex scenes are almost as gruesome as the surgeries, almost as disgusting– I wished the camera would pan away, but it would remain dead still. The most incredible scene being when Rebekka, played by Ane Dahl Torp, fellates a man in front of her teenage daughter. As the film became more and more dreadful, I remembered the Brother’s Grimm story, and what Elvira will surely do to fit the glass slipper.
The end screen reads, Slutt, in pink letters. After leaving the cinema, I went to a café with my sister. She had a slice of cake. I didn’t.
The Ugly Stepsister is on at Watershed until at least the 1st May. You can grab your tickets here, with £5 tickets for anyone 24 and under!
