I’d say alternate versions of fairy tales and other classic stories are having a moment right now, but that’s arguably been true for quite some time. The novel that inspired Wicked is several decades old, while movies like Maleficent and Frozen remixed and reimagined the villains of other iconic fables into heroes more than ten years ago. It seems our patience has run out for simple narratives of good vs. evil — maybe because we know there’s usually more to such stories, or maybe because the villains were always a lot more fun. All this is to say that what makes Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister so powerful isn’t that it turns the tables on a classic fairy tale — frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long to get a movie sympathizing with Cinderella’s allegedly homely, dim-bulb stepsisters — but rather the way it does so, by placing us in a world of bleak, magically-inflected terror that underlines the base grotesquerie of the original. The Ugly Stepsister (which premieres at the Sundance Film Festival Thursday, ahead of an eventual IFC/Shudder release) reveals a dark truth we’ve probably secretly known all along: Cinderella was always a body horror story.
The film begins with wide-eyed Elvira (Lea Myren) and her younger sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) accompanying their widowed mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) to the kingdom of Swedlandia to join forces with older, single landowner Otto (Ralph Carlsson) and his lovely daughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). After Otto keels dead on their first evening together, both families discover something shocking: Neither has any money, and each had married the other hoping to salvage their fortunes. An indefatigable dreamer who religiously reads the syrupy love poetry of Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), the cheerfully apple-cheeked but perpetually awkward Elvira imagines marrying the handsome young monarch — not just because she adores him, but also because it would save her family.
The film indulges Elvira’s fantasies with blasts of ethereal, anachronistic synth music and brief, hazy dream sequences; that the movie’s ostensible present doesn’t quite feel real also adds to the protagonist’s helplessness. A happy future for her seems impossible, and the cold hard light of reality is itself a bleak twilight. With her mouth full of braces, her narrow eyebrows, her zits, her full figure, and her fondness for hidden Danishes, Elvira is no match for the graceful, angelic, blond, blue-eyed Agnes, who might be a vision of perfection but also becomes spiteful and scheming towards her stepfamily after the death of her father. Of course, who can entirely blame Agnes? The family’s so poor now that Rebekka refuses even to bury dear old Otto, opting instead to let Agnes’s father rot in a dark backroom as flies and maggots gradually consume his carcass. Also, Agnes has been shtupping the stable-boy Isak (Malte Gårdinger), and when Rebekka finds them together she kicks the young man (still naked) off the grounds, thus embracing her fate as the cruel, heartless stepmother of fairy lore.
The impending ball where Prince Julius (who we learn is a total sleazebag, to no one’s surprise) will choose one of the kingdom’s eligible virgins to be his bride sets the clock ticking on Elvira’s longing to become more desirable. In her case, however, there is no fairy godmother, but rather a demented surgeon named Dr. Esthetique (Adam Lundrgen) who yanks out her braces, chisels her nose into shape, and weaves new lashes into her eyelids — all filmed, naturally, in excruciating close-ups. That’s not counting the brutal dance lessons, or a novel solution to the weight-loss thing: Elvira swallows a tapeworm egg, and as the worms grow (and growl) inside her belly, she can eat whatever she wants and still shed inches. It’s like Ozempic, but alive.
We know, of course, that none of this will end well, and Blichfeldt gives us every gnarly, disgusting consequence in agonizing detail, be it vomit, blood, severed body parts, or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, the film is beautiful in its own way, like a Scandinavian fairy-tale riff on Italian giallo, narratively disquieting but cinematically exhilarating. The director isn’t interested in shock and outrage so much as she is in mood and texture. We can feel the tapeworms, the nausea, the anguish, the sheer physicality of Elvira’s distress and ambition. We feel the sadness, too. Maybe once upon a time we were supposed to identify with Cinderella, but the truth is that we’re all ugly stepsisters at heart.
But what makes this picture so wonderfully unsettling is that its dark bits and pieces (literal ones, in some cases) feel curiously familiar. Partly this is because Blichfeldt has so fully imagined this world that its sinister magic rings true, and partly because some of the story’s more twisted elements actually hail from the original: Cinderella itself is a deeply fucked-up story, and it resonates because beneath its dreamy gloss it reveals something about a deeply fucked-up world. The Ugly Stepsister’s grossness feels organic, both to its source material and to our own lives.