The Ugly Stepsister
Den stygge stesøsteren

Retelling a classic story from another character's perspective is almost always fun, and Norwegian writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt's debut feature does this in a unique way. The Ugly Stepsister retells Cinderella from the perspective of the elder daughter of the woman who marries the soon-to-dead father of a beautiful, would-be princess. While the film makes the awkward teenage stepsister Elvira (Lea Myren) its protagonist, it doesn't necessarily paint her as a hero. Nor does it make the Cinderella character, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), an outright villain. The movie ain't what ya'd call subtle, but it sets just the right tone early on and then sticks with it.

Blichfeldt mines equal amounts of humor, tragedy, body horror, and social commentary in this midnight movie version of a fairy tale. Intentionally pushing the extremes of her characters and leaning into the grimness of the Grimm source material, the film visualizes events that appear in many of the old written versions of the folktale that have been excised from most modern tellings from the 1950 Disney animated classic on.

The Ugly Stepsister succeeds where last year's overblown and underwritten The Substance fails. It is not at all timid about making barbed thematic points about internalized misogyny, the monetization of unattainable beauty standards in a patriarchal society, and how, in capitalism (including the old feudal capitalism of yore), marriage is many women's best and sometimes only shot at escaping poverty. Yet, while none of these points are subtextual, the movie doesn't have to contrive its narrative illogically to get them across, and it doesn't require its characters to make ridiculous choices in service of the filmmaker's thesis. This is a substantive gross-out picture that never sells out its ideas. Instead, it pushes the envelope of what an audience can stomach in ways that drive home its themes most satisfyingly.