Emilie Blichfeldt’s directorial debut makes The Substance look like a fairy tale.
★★★★
There’s revisionist fairy tale cinema, and then there’s The Ugly Stepsister—a bruised, beguiling descent into the margins of a myth we thought we knew. Written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt in a startlingly assured debut, the film strips Cinderella of its tinsel and reassurances, focusing instead on the one figure we were never meant to empathize with: the unloved, unchosen, and—here—unforgettably anguished stepsister.
Set in the decadent, decaying kingdom of Swedlandia, the film follows Elvira (Lea Myren), a plain, awkward girl goaded by her mother into a grotesque campaign of beautification, all to outshine her stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) and win the affection of Prince Julian. The surgeries are brutal, the expectations endless, and the hunger—both literal and figurative—deepens with every scene.
A revelation at Sundance, The Ugly Stepsister flips Cinderella upside down—as if reimagined by David Cronenberg, Juraj Herz, and Angela Carter – and makes The Substance look like a fairy tale. Blichfeldt’s script crackles with bitter lyricism and emotional rot. Dialogue is sparse but potent, and each plot beat arrives like a blossoming bruise. A feminist body-horror take-down of Disney princess niceties, The Ugly Stepsister knows that the best fairytales were the ones that give you nightmares.
Lea Myren gives a breakout performance—desperate, aching, and increasingly feral—as a daughter trapped in a household that worships beauty and punishes everything else. Elvira isn’t a villain; she’s a fly in a web spun long before her birth. Ane Dahl Torp is chilling as Rebekka, the matriarch, a woman who rules by omission, her love a tool sharpened into control. Agnes hovers on the edge of unreality—glowing, silent, half-symbol, half-sister. She’s both a fully-formed character and a weapon, fashioned by the world and pointed at Elvira.
The Ugly Stepsister puts the grim in Brothers Grimm. Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography shows a world thick with grime and atmosphere—you can almost smell the damp and decay—while the production design conjures a world held together by creaking wood, flaking paint, and dying candlelight. This is a folk-horror fairy tale where the palaces are full of dancing but bellies are full of worms, and corpses rot in sealed rooms. The ball sequence—yes, there is one—is a hallucinatory anxiety-dream complete with meat, masks, and menace. John Erik Kaada’s score hums and warps like breath caught in a throat: detuned strings, haunted harpsichords, and blasts of ahistorical synth conjure a subtly deranged Mitteleuropean energy, into which modern—and perhaps timeless—anxieties are projected. The cost of beauty has never looked so haunting.
A fairytale for final girls, The Ugly Stepsister doesn’t offer a clean moral or easy catharsis. It doesn’t plead for sympathy for its complex women. Instead, it demands something far more enduring: recognition. This is a Cinderella fable that drips with blood and bile, and where everyone is both heroine and villain all at once. The characters may not wish to acknowledge the second part—but hey, if the shoe fits…
The Ugly Stepsister is in US cinemas on April 18th, UK cinemas on April 25th, and is coming to Shudder later in the year.
Whitlock&Pope 