“The Ugly Stepsister” is “an ingenious revisionist body-horror version of Cinderella” that unfolds from the perspective of the fairy-tale’s antagonist, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. In 18th century central Europe, “cynical widow” Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) remarries a man she thinks has a vast fortune – only for him to drop dead at their wedding breakfast. Left “financially embarrassed”, she must now care for her sweet but “plain” daughter Elvira (Lea Myren) and a new stepdaughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), a “beautiful” young woman whom Rebekka relegates to the role of servant. News that the handsome Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) is to host a ball where he will choose his bride seems to offer a way out, said Hannah Strong in Little White Lies.
To improve Elvira’s chances, her mother subjects her to a series of “harrowing cosmetic procedures” – feeding her a tapeworm to lose weight, “breaking and resetting her nose” and “sewing false eyelashes into her eyelids”. As she becomes beautiful, the initially pleasant young woman “grows vain and self-obsessed”, and is so fixated on the prince she can’t see that he isn’t up to much himself. Indeed, almost none of the characters are sympathetic (even Agnes, the Cinderella figure, is conceited and unkind), and the women in particular are horrid.
All of this creates a “sour air”, in a film that uses a lot of “creative gore” to disguise the flimsiness of its concept. It’s certainly gruesome, said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. But it’s also “slyly funny” and “visually captivating”. Myren is brilliant as Elvira, and grounds what is ultimately a movie about “the physical agony of aesthetic conformity”.
Emilie Blichfeldt’s cutting Norwegian revision of the classic fairy tale leaves no character unscathed
