‘The Ugly Stepsister’ REVIEW: A torturous retelling through female hunger
‘The Ugly Stepsister’ REVIEW: A torturous retelling through female hunger
Picture 1: Lea Myren as Elvira in The Ugly Stepsister / Photo taken from Prime Video
If you look closely at The Ugly Stepsister, you will realize that misogyny should not exist. And so do… braces? More questions were raised on how a scene could be more insane than the last in this satirical black comedy. Writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt takes us to a grim reiteration of the classic tale of Cinderella. This time, it explores the once-innocent lens of one stepsister.
In comparison to Disney’s Cinderella or the folk tale of the same name, for that matter, the stepsisters in this 2025 Norwegian film are portrayed as kind, bright-eyed, and a little scruffy. Elvira (Lea Myren) demonstrates that, despite her age, her youthfulness shines through an anachronistic set of braces and often dimpled smile. The other stepsister, Alma (Flo Fagerli), though younger, has a more grounded aura, balancing out her slightly disheveled French braids.
Elvira is head over heels for Julian (Isac Calmroth), the kingdom’s prince. Her daily routine includes lying down on the grass as she reads the prince’s book of romantic poems. Misty scenes of her and the prince eloping also run in her mind all day like a dream, playing in slow motion with white vignettes. A soft hunger starts within Elvira. Her desire to be with the prince, at this point, is a craving she can tame — like fancying a sweet treat after a savory meal.
Elvira, Alma, and their mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) soon move into the home of Otto (Ralph Carlsson) and his daughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess). Rebekka marries Otto in the hopes of combining their wealth and climbing up a social class, only for Otto to die the following evening. Agnes, in mourning for her father, also becomes hostile towards her stepfamily. Ironically, Agnes is supposed to be Cinderella’s counterpart.
Picture 2: Lea Myren as Elvira and Ane Dahl Torp as Rebekka in The Ugly Stepsister / Photo Taken from Prime Video
Rebekka, mirroring the villainy of Lady Tremaine from Cinderella, proves that she’s even worse. She feigns caring about her daughters when she only ever cares about money and her own desires. So when the opportunity to marry the prince comes, she is determined to place both Agnes and Elvira as candidate brides. From here on, we see Elvira do everything it takes to claim the seat adjoining the prince’s, even if it means starving herself to death.
We see Elvira’s hunger only grow from here. But this hunger is excellently paced for the audience and strategically (and tragically) fed onto Elvira, one pivotal scene after the other.
The film, although satirical, is a bold social commentary on how women are not born with a criterion for perfection in mind, but instead are deliberately instilled from what can only be discovered out of one’s bubble, or even from your own mother.
Picture 3: Elvira in The Ugly Stepsister / Photo taken from Prime Video
Elvira was a young and zealous romantic, excited for a new chapter of her life with her new family, but we see the life slowly drain from her eyes as she continues to get beaten up from the constant pressure to be perfect. One of Elvira’s first brutal subjections to being a favored woman was when her mother sent her to a finishing school, not to mention how her mother, instead of spending her dwindling wealth on Otto’s burial, squandered it on school fees and cosmetic surgeries for Elvira. As Elvira takes classes for etiquette and ballet, a dead body rots away on their dining table — a foreshadowing of how Elvira slowly rots inside throughout the film.
One scene also showed how her dinner looked different than the rest of her family’s. Her family’s plates have protein and greens, while hers has lemon slices and ice. Unintentional or not, this can be a parallel to the weight loss myth of drinking lemon water. And in the film, her weight was under severe scrutiny by her mother and her instructors.
At one point, we see a character we can potentially root for. After Elvira gets berated for not falling in line with the standards, she receives some encouragement from one of her instructors, Sophie (Cecilia Forss). “You’re changing your outside to fit what you know is on the inside,” Sophie says to Elvira, providing the latter with a sense of understanding, a confirmation that she sees her pupil’s efforts. Sophie also calls her brave. There was a build-up that we would finally see a character acknowledge how women are faring with beauty at the time, but we only get further validation of why Elvira needs to fare the same way. After Sophie’s compliment, she gives Elvira a tapeworm egg to help with her weight loss.
Picture 4: Elvira in The Ugly Stepsister / Photo taken from Prime Video
At this point, Elvira can only succumb to the strain or let her physical and emotional toils become fruitless. Her determination comes only as saddening because she was determined clearly to the wrong principles.
Blichfeldt’s feature debut brought life to intense characters with intense motives. It was easy to pick who to root for and who to wish never existed. Several scenes utilized physical intimacy to reveal the loyalties of certain characters, but I couldn’t help but recoil at them, almost mirroring the twisted body horror sequences the film contains.
These standards, whether in statutes from the 19th century or engraved in product labels of whitening soap today, are even further shoved down women’s throats when they are validated by the people surrounding us. The roots are even more difficult to reach and completely cut off when the people who encourage these standards have also been living by them.
These expectations are not only societal, but also generational. Unlearning these standards is sometimes easier said than done, especially when we are raised by them, just as our matriarchs were too. This hunger for fitting into the femininity benchmark is not only learned brick by brick, but also passed down to us like an heirloom. But just as heirlooms sometimes come in the form of something fragile, it’s impactful when it breaks.
‘The Ugly Stepsister’ was part of the 2025 QCinema International Film Festival’s lineup under the Before Midnight program.
