The Ugly Stepsister Review | A Fantastic, Feminist Return To Cinderella’s Gory, Gothic Roots

Bathed in shades of red, Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister begins not with Cinderella but Elvira’s lovesick dreams about the Prince whose poetry—cloaked in the language of courtly love—reads more like thinly-veiled smut for the royal fangirls. Told from the point of view of Elvira (Lea Myren), one of Cinderella’s “ugly” stepsisters, Blichfeldt’s debut is Bridgerton (2020) for the goth girlies if the Regency romp swapped tea parties for tapeworms and eyeliner for stitches.

This feminist body horror drips with gothic style and grotesque beauty as it follows Elvira’s tormented journey through twisted rituals of beauty and becoming. The Ugly Stepsister rips Cinderella out of its pastel Disney kingdom and thrusts her back into the sinewy, bloodstained terrain of Brothers Grimm as it is based on Aschenputtel (The Little Glass Slipper).

The story is a familiar one for the most part. Elvira and Alma’s ambitious mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) marries the elderly Otto (Ralph Carlsson), who promptly leaves her widowed once more. He leaves behind his daughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss)—the Cinderella in this tale—in Rebekka’s care along with no money. Rebekka thus becomes the believably heartless character who sees her daughters’ bodies (as well as her own) as tools to climb out of evident penury.

When Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) takes a break from publishing erotic poetry and announces he will marry the belle of his next ball, Elvira gets giddy with hope. So naturally, Rebekka takes Elvira to a medieval plastic surgeon, the aptly named Dr. Esthétique (Adam Lundgren)—the name is a bit on the nose but works in this satirical setting. “Beauty is pain,” reads the clinic slogan of the cocaine-snorting physician who rips Elvira’s braces out and “fixes” her slightly bumpy nose with the precision of a butcher.

Blichfeldt leans into body horror as an extension of the patriarchal grotesque. She puts her lens on how women are mutilated, trimmed, starved, and reshaped to conform. In one scene, Elvira’s finishing school’s prim headmistress (Cecilia Forss) hands her a tapeworm egg and an antidote for when its work is done—that is, helped Elvira slim down more. This may seem absurdly grotesque, but it is not drawn from a macabre imagination alone. The so-called “tapeworm diet” is real and gained notoriety in the Victorian era, long before Ozempic or Mounjaro came along. Lucy Morgan spoke about how the diet is still around in her January 2025 piece for Glamour UK “The ‘tapeworm diet’ is back—will millennial women like me ever escape these cursed fad diets?”

In Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister, the tapeworm becomes both literal and symbolic. It is a crawling, squirming indictment of how deeply the pursuit of beauty can burrow into the body and mind. It is a stomach-churning reminder that we’ve long measured women’s worth by their waistlines. It is cinematic proof that pushing women to take up as little space as possible is not a modern phenomenon at all.

But what makes The Ugly Stepsister such a compelling reimagining of this age-old tale is not just Blichfeldt’s gaze on the exploited female body, but her equally incisive attention to the psychological and emotional toll exacted on them.

Elvira’s descent into insecurity, obsession, and cruelty is slow, but painfully human. Her fixation with Prince Julian—a vapid, misogynistic prince whose personality is as thin as his privilege is thick—is less about love and more about validation. In that sense, she is like a young Sansa Stark (Game of Thrones (2011)), still enchanted by the myth of the perfect prince, unaware of the rot beneath the crown. Agnes pays dearly for her brief moment of agency but this Cinderella is not a passive damsel either. Alma (Flo Fagerli), Elvira’s often-overlooked younger sister in pop culture renditions, is given a rebellious edge here too.

Alma is the first to call out the madness—horrified at Elvira’s self-mutilation and raging against their mother’s blind encouragement of it all. She gets her dreaded first period the same night the worm writhes inside Elvira, crawling toward her bellybutton like something out of The Thing (1982). Puberty and horror, womanhood and decay—Blichfeldt draws the parallels at every opportunity she gets.

Visually, The Ugly Stepsister is stunning as it depicts its madness through visuals of decaying delicatessen and synchronised, feathered ballerinas. Together, Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography, Manon Rasmussen’s costumes, Peter Hjort’s visual effects, and Thomas Foldberg’s makeup create a whimsi-gothic yet claustrophobic fairy tale world. So many frames look like paintings, the elegance of which directly contrasts the grotesquerie of its themes. The closer you get to beauty in this world, the more you see the decay underneath.

That is the film’s most powerful motif. Beauty is both the prize and the punishment. So it makes sense that in the final act sisterhood offers a sliver of salvation. This is not the saccharine kind of girl power propelled by a makeover montage and spurning bad boys in favour of a nicer specimen. This is the bruised alliance of those who have bled under the same rules and finally chosen to burn the book. After all, the only way to escape the weight of patriarchy's expectations is in its complete rejection.

Blichfeldt’s use of body horror follows in the lineage of David Cronenberg’s obsession with transformation. Here it becomes a medium for purging the patriarchy as it is visually evoked when Alma prises the tapeworms out of Elvira.

You will not walk away from The Ugly Stepsister wondering who’s the fairest of them all. I didn’t. I wondered whether fairness, in this deeply unfair world, ever really comes unburdened, without exacting a cost in dignity or identity. I mused over how the curated aesthetics of beauty, like wealth, is just another commodity hoarded by the few. I also chuckled at the memory of the meme that goes: “You’re not ugly, you’re just poor.”

Debiparna Chakraborty is a film, TV, and culture critic dissecting media at the intersection of gender, politics, and power.