With the surprise crossover success of Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes body-horror hit The Substance last year, there was a lot of blather about how the Academy was finally ready to cozy up to genre films. Now, as if to test that thesis, up pops this extraordinary film from Norway, an extreme fairytale that premiered at Sundance and explores similar themes of female desire and self-esteem but pushes things so much, much further with the odd (really) graphic sex scene and squeamish depictions of body modification. Emilie Blichfeldt’s dark, funny, provocative film could easily lose a few of these moments to find a (slightly) more mainstream audience than it will end up attracting. But to her credit, she goes all in, and her audaciously militant vision suggests a director whose name is soon to be catnip for actors who like to pester their agents for challenging new projects.
As the title suggests, it’s a familiar object seen from an unfamiliar angle—a Cinderella story in which Cinderella barely gets a look-in. The lead character is Elvira (Lea Myren), the teenage daughter of a society woman who is beside herself when her widowed mother Rebekka (the terrific Ane Dahl Torp) remarries into a storied and seemingly very rich family. Her new home is a castle, and these new surroundings stoke her delirious fantasies of marrying local nobleman Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), poet and heartthrob. This dream comes closer to becoming real when Elvira, and her beautiful new stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) are invited to a society ball that the prince is hosting.
In the meantime, though, Elvira has learned the truth about her mother’s new husband: after he drops down dead at the dinner table, it transpires that he is broke—which is news to the now-despondent Rebekka too (“Do you think it’s easy to find a rich man who would want me?” she tells Elvira. “A widow with saggy tits and two hopeless daughters?”). In dire need of money, leaving her husband’s body to rot in the cellar, Rebekka plows her remaining cash into Elvira, hoping that the prince’s ball will find her a wealthy suitor.
Interestingly, Blichfeldt has a lot of time for the characters that are usually branded villains in the traditional story, and—in quite the switcheroo—portrays Elvira’s rival, Agnes, the Cinderella of this story, as a snooty brat, who is demoted to scullery maid after being caught having sex with the stable boy. But even so, there’s no sense of the rivalry that’s so key to the folk tale it’s based on; even in this heightened fairytale world, all women are second-class citizens, there for the enjoyment of men. Elvira and Agnes are both victims here, and Myren brings so much pathos to the party, playing a young woman struggling to find her place in the world and her self-worth. This is where the title comes into play, as Blichfeldt unpicks the sexist framing of the Cinderella story. What makes the stepsister “ugly”? And, since we’re asking, what is “beauty” anyway?
This seemingly whimsical philosophical idea is brought to the screen with a bang, largely in the character of Dr. Esthétique (Adam Lundgren), a cheesy cosmetic surgeon who, in readiness for the ball, reshapes Elvira’s nose with a chisel and laces fake eyelashes into her eyelids in gruesome scenes that recall, and surpass, A Clockwork Orange. In the meantime, Agnes gets a visit from a fairy godmother, who creates a stunning ballgown for her from silkworms and somehow woofles up a carriage from a pumpkin in (presumably) magical scenes we don’t even see.
It’s a fantastic thought experiment, in that the genius of Blichfeldt’s film is that it explodes the stereotypes that the Cinderella story is built on: It doesn’t play the two women off against each other in a sordid competition for the attention of the prince—revealed early on to be something of a jerk anyway. Instead, it shows them both in equal states of servitude and desperation.
The climax, inevitably, involves an errant slipper, and Elvira’s horrific attempts to make her foot fit into it are not for the fainthearted. In some ways, that’s a shame, since the strong sex and gore will certainly limit The Ugly Stepsister’s commercial appeal. But at the same time, it’s something different and exciting, and the film’s raunchy punk-rock energy is a vibe that will leave a lot of people hungry for more.
Title: The Ugly Stepsister
Distributor: Vertigo (UK), IFC (US)
Director/screenwriter: Emilie Blichfeldt
Cast: Lea Myren, Ane Dahl Torp, Thea Sofie Loch Naess, Isac Calmroth, Adam Lundgren
Running time: 1 hr 45 mins
