By Ziggy Himsworth, Second Year, English
Thanks to Watershed, I got to catch Emilie Blichfeldt’s 2025 The Ugly Stepsister (Den Stygge Stesøsteren) before its theatrical release. This film is the bloody answer to the question that gnaws at you from the mirror: how much discomfort, how much pain can I stand to inflict on myself to escape this body I’m tethered to?
The Cinderella tale, to my mind, was always meant to be body horror. It is about beauty given at birth and taken away in jealousy, and the pressures of marriage, sexuality, and virginity that turn women toward the violent hatred of their own 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 considered unappealing, unattractive. She wears tight ringlets, just like in the Disney animation, and thick metal braces. She is fat — or at least told she is — and overshadowed by the grace of her stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). At times, the film feels like an awkward coming-of-age comedy: Elvira fantasises in hazy pastels of her prince whisking her away, accompanied by John Erik Kadda’s nostalgically electronic and ambient score. The dancing sequence is a dreamy vision of romance, with slow, floating choreography reminiscent of ‘Beauty School Dropout’ from Grease.
But the colours fade quickly, the fairy tale becomes mangled, and under her mother’s instruction, 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 winces, and someone behind me says, “Guys, it’s only going to get worse…” An aesthetician smashes her face 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 depictions of period blood as repulsive, but here it feels 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, surrounded by wildflowers and eaten by maggots. He becomes bloated and decomposed, turning strange colours. Cinderella lies on the blue dress at his feet. Elvira bathes in the dark, gorging herself on spaghetti so hastily that some falls into the water. She runs her hand through her hair; it comes out in clumps and lands in 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,” and she chooses to swallow it herself. It grows and grows inside her, eating her up, making her binge on cakes, making 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 – 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.
Can a fairy tale survive when it’s stripped down to its most grotesque truths?
