Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister is classic body horror, with a twist. It’s the kind of debut film that grabs you by the lapels, smiles sweetly, and then quietly slips a knife between your ribs. It’s a fairy tale, sure, but only in the way the original Grimm stories were fairy tales. This one wants to hurt you a little. Maybe a lot.
At the center is Elvira, played with aching vulnerability by Lea Myren, a young woman cursed not by magic but by comparison. Her beautiful stepsister Agnes, portrayed with chilly grace by Thea Sofie Loch Næss, floats through this world like a living Pinterest board of Nordic perfection. Elvira exists in her shadow, and Blichfeldt makes that shadow feel suffocating. You can almost hear the clock ticking every time Elvira looks in a mirror.
Blichfeldt, who also wrote the film, directs with a confidence that’s frankly unsettling. The camera lingers too long on bodies, skin, teeth, hair. Beauty here isn’t aspirational. It’s surgical. There’s a streak of body horror running through the film that recalls The Neon Demon, but where Nicolas Winding Refn was cool and detached, Blichfeldt is furious and intimate. This is beauty culture as a meat grinder, and Elvira keeps stepping closer to the blades.
The production design leans hard into rot beneath refinement. Gowns are gorgeous until you notice how tightly they bind. Candlelit rooms feel warm until they feel claustrophobic. Even silence becomes oppressive, broken only by the faint sounds of breathing, scraping, chewing. The sound design does a lot of heavy lifting here, and it knows exactly when to make us squirm.
The film isn’t without flaws. Its pacing drags slightly in the middle, and its message about beauty and worth is hammered home with perhaps too much enthusiasm. Subtlety is not always invited to this party.
Still, The Ugly Stepsister announces Emilie Blichfeldt as a filmmaker with teeth. Sharp ones. This isn’t a story about finding inner beauty. It’s about what happens when the world convinces you that beauty is the only thing that matters, and what you’re willing to carve away to get there.
RHFC Rating: 6.5/10 🍿
