‘The Ugly Stepsister’ review: The fairy tale ‘Cinderella’ gets the shock treatment

Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister approaches Cinderella as does a cat a glass object – with every intention of merry destruction. By the time Blichfeldt is done, the classic fairy tale about a nobleman’s daughter who wins over a prince through her comely virtue lies shattered in pieces.

Blichfeldt’s body horror satire is set once upon a time in a fictitious kingdom in Europe. Elvira (Lea Myren) is fixated on marrying the prince Julian, clutching to her 18-year-old bosom a book of his doggerel. Socially inept, with braced teeth, bad skin and a kilo too many, Elvira faces fierce competition from her step-sister, the conventionally attractive Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss).

Elvira’s ambitious mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) is unfazed, subjecting her daughter to painful plastic surgery and dodgy weight loss methods. At the finishing school where Elvira struggles in her debutante training, she is told, you are changing your outside to fit what you know is on the inside. This advice acquires a dark meaning when Elvira starts to transform externally and internally.

The Ugly Stepsister makes inspired connections between the body horror genre and unreal beauty standards imposed on women. Out of the ashes of Cinderella emerges a movie that fits snugly into the shallow, looks-obsessed and...

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