Combining the bawdiness of Walerian Borowczyk's medieval fantasies with the postmodernism of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Norwegian writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister might be described as a neo-fairy tale. It's essentially the Cinderella story, taking elements from both the Perrault and Brothers Grimm versions, and it's set in a beautifully rendered version of some non-existent Scandinavian kingdom of the past. But the trouble with fairy tales is that they were written hundreds of years ago when the world was a cruel and insensitive place, and their black and white presentation of good and evil doesn't fit with our modern sensibilities. Nor does the reprehensible idea present in so many fairy tales that physical "ugliness" is a sign of bad moral fibre.
In similar fashion to Disney's Maleficent, Blichfeldt seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of a classic fairy tale villain, one of Cinderella's "ugly" stepsisters, and in doing so critiques feminine beauty standards that persist to this day.
The eponymous anti-heroine is 18-year-old Elvira (Lea Myren). She's far from ugly by any rational metric, but she carries a little puppy fat and is self-conscious as a result. When her mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), marries what she mistakenly believes to be a wealthy widower, Elvira and her younger sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) gain a stepsister in Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss - what a name!). With her very Scandinavian blue eyes, blonde locks and high cheekbones, Agnes makes Elvira all the more self-conscious.
Agnes is the Cinderella figure here, but Blichfeldt initially posits her as the antagonist of the piece, cruelly mocking her new stepsister and preying on her insecurity. When Rebekka's husband keels over during dinner and she learns that far from being financially endowed, he was actually in debt to the kingdom, she morphs into the classic wicked stepmother, turning Agnes into her overworked servant and forcing her to sleep in a stable. Rebekka becomes determined to turn Elvira into a beauty who will catch the eye of the kingdom's most eligible bachelor, the young Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). Elvira has long been obsessed with the idea of becoming Julian's princess, and so she willingly goes along with her mother's gruelling campaign to quite literally reshape her daughter.
This is where The Ugly Stepsister enters the realm of horror, as Elvira is sent to a finishing school where she is bullied by a ballet instructor (Katarzyna Herman, channelling Alida Valli in Suspiria) who mocks her appearance and ungainly ways. Body horror comes with the arrival of a surgeon (Adam Lundgren) who employs brutal methods to chisel Elvira a new nose. The old urban legend around the Slimfast plan is evoked when Elvira is encouraged to swallow a tapeworm which will consume any food she eats. And then there's the classic foot mutilation of the fairy tale, rendered her in gory detail. At this point in my life I thought I was immune to gore and body trauma, but there are a couple of moments in The Ugly Stepsister that had me fully wincing, especially a bit involving an eye that would make Lucio Fulci flinch.
As Elvira, Maren is a revelation. Elvira's transformation from a sympathetic ugly duckling to a beautiful but unlikeable swan and back again is pulled off not so much by the prosthetics and body doubles (it might be the first time an actress has used a body double to make herself seem less attractive in her nude scenes) but by Maren's physicality, achieving so much with simple shifts of posture.
Elvira is well and truly put through the wringer, and we find ourselves torn at certain points over whether we should continue to root for her or ally ourselves with Agnes, who becomes more likeable the more humility she displays. Unlike classic fairy tales, there's no black and white morality presented here. Elvira and Agnes are at alternate points both the victim and the antagonist of the story. If there's an outright villain it's the society that forces these women to become enemies as they strive for the attention of a prince who is revealed early on to be far from charming. Much like The Substance, The Ugly Stepsister details the lengths women will go to in order to reach standards of beauty, and how such standards can turn women against each other, but Blichfeldt's fairy tale kingdom is a more convincing setting than the exaggerated version of Hollywood in Fargeat's flawed take on the theme. This is a fairy tale where we suspect nobody will live happily ever after.
Directed by: Emilie Blichfeldt
Starring: Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp, Flo Fagerli, Isac Calmroth
