If you go to enough film festivals and seek out the horror offerings therein, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll come across some rather extreme new visions. Far from the more mainstream gruesome but not too gruesome genre fare that frequently come and go in theaters without leaving much of a mark, these are the hidden horror gems that, even when a little rough around the edges, still shine bright. The best of them grab hold of you in a way few other films can, leaving you enraptured by the visceral visions being created on the screen even if you occasionally feel the urge to look away from the escalating violence unfolding before you.
At Cannes last year it was Coralie Fargeat’s smash hit “The Substance,” which wielded its bloody ideas like a sledgehammer, smashing through subtlety with chaotic energy to spare. At Sundance this year, it is writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt’s feature debut “The Ugly Stepsister,” which is like if Fargeat’s film got smashed together with Cinderella, a bit of Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite” and the gone-too-soon series “The Great” to create one of the most macabre, mean-spirited fairy tales you’ll ever see. It’s far from perfect and is at its brutal best in the final stretch, though it manages to get there in mostly one piece — even when its characters do not.
After premiering Thursday at the festival, it’s a film that offers little in the way of surprises for those who are familiar with the broad strokes of its Cinderella story, but delivers when it comes to the demoralizing depths to which it takes us within the narrative. This is a film about the desperation of a family that gets put on the shoulders of the eldest daughter as she is now their last hope for salvation when a marriage undertaken for primarily economic reasons meets a deathly end over dinner. Elvira, played well by relative newcomer Lea Myren, is not an insecure person, at least not initially, though she’ll become pressured by all around her to do most anything to herself to get what it is they want. This mainly involves painful cosmetic surgeries galore where they cut and hack at her as well as a very ill-advised attempt to lose weight that threatens to consume the aspiring princess from the inside out. As we watch this unfold in agonizing, depraved detail, the inevitability of the coming disaster only makes the march toward it that much more effective.
Using fantasy visions of the prince (who writes the worst poetry you’ve ever heard) before turning them on their head to bring it closer to the Grimm version of the story, the experience of watching “The Ugly Stepsister” is less about being surprised by what happens than it is being made squeamish by the way it pulls everything off. After all, a character going through surgery after surgery to mold them into a picture-perfect princess could sound like a banal, brutal exercise in repetition. However, wait until you see a needle coming right up to the edge of a character’s eye in a discomforting POV closeup and then you’ll begin to get a sense of what Blichfeldt and her cinematographer Marcel Zyskind are cooking here. The craft ensures the film succeeds at not just getting under the skin, but taking up residence there, burrowing right to the beating heart of the story and coming away with a pound of flesh. This makes for a cruel, if a little on-the-nose at key points, riff on body image, self-loathing and the lengths we’ll go to fit the narrow definition of beauty society sets forth for us. It often plays as a gag, but they’re all pointedly painful ones.
There is a prevailing sense of snark and sarcasm threaded throughout the film that lessens some of the emotional impact it seems to be occasionally reaching for. In everything from the often incongruous score to the staging and sudden zooms, which results in some of the most unique and strange framings of genitals you’ll ever see, “The Ugly Stepsister” has its swollen tongue firmly in cheek. This leaves elements feeling more superficial than sincere and is where, even with their connective tissue, it falls short of something like “The Substance.” Where that film had moments of genuine, wide-ranging emotion, like when its central character takes a long look at herself in the mirror before coming apart, “The Ugly Stepsister” is less interested in slowing down for more thoughtful beats. It’s all about hurtling towards the conclusion. It can make the film not just a punishing one, as that comes with the territory, but a fleeting one where the interiority of the characters can get a little lost in the shuffle of the spectacle on display.
However, no matter, as once the film reaches the fearsome finale, all the parts that didn’t connect largely fade away in the mind. After Plan A to win the prince goes awry and the shoe ends up on the other foot, so to speak, is where “The Ugly Stepsister” doesn’t pull any punches. There are the darkest of dark jokes, one involving a character misremembering what shoe they were trying to fit into and taking extreme measures to do so that is killer, as well as an unhinged sense that we’re about to dip into something closer to a “Saw” film. When you look back, you realize the movie had been surprisingly tame and lacking in blood, but that makes this final letting loose all the more effectively brutal to behold. It then takes a steep dive into just feeling bitterly sad in a way that it doesn’t fully have a handle on, with a couple of quick closing shots proving contrived at best and misguided at worst — though it’s impossible to deny how committed the film is to seeing things through to the bitter end. There is no riding off into the sunset with the handsome prince. Instead, it’s a macabre meal of a movie many will struggle to keep down. Bite in as much as you like, but best beware what you consume as it may just make its way back up.
Shudder bought “The Ugly Stepsister” ahead of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
