The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
Fairy tales, as the Brothers Grimm well knew before the sanitising of the Disney era, were never really for children. They were cautionary instruments, blunt as a mallet, full of mutilation, vanity and social punishment. It is into this older, uglier tradition that Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt plants The Ugly Stepsister (2025), a Scandinavian co-production pulling together backing from Mer Film, Lava Films, MOTOR, Scanbox Production and Zentropa International Sweden. The film takes the Cinderella story, one of the most retold narratives in Western culture, and turns it around to face the character we have always looked past: Elvira, the stepsister whose name itself has become shorthand for a kind of female failure. Set in a heightened fairy-tale kingdom where beauty functions less as a gift than as a currency, it asks what a woman is supposed to do when the economy is rigged against her from the start. It is a question with a very long history, and Blichfeldt approaches it with the kind of formal confidence you would not necessarily expect from a debut feature.
Blichfeldt, who also wrote the screenplay, is making her first feature film here, and the project arrives trailing genuine festival attention. The production spans Denmark, Norway, Poland and Sweden, which gives it a particular kind of European art-house pedigree, the sort of multinational consortium that tends to free a filmmaker up rather than box them in. Norwegian cinema has shown a real taste for genre work with a subversive edge, as anyone who caught Dead Snow will know, though Blichfeldt is working in very different territory: closer to folk horror and body horror than to outright splatter, and far more interested in the social mechanics of female competition than in jump scares. The source material is, of course, the Cinderella canon, but the film's real conversation partners are rather more contemporary, sitting alongside recent works that treat female beauty not as a blessing but as a system of demand and compliance.
Lea Myren carries the film as Elvira, and the role requires a performer willing to go to some uncomfortable places, both physically and emotionally. Opposite her, Ane Dahl Torp, a Norwegian actor with substantial screen presence and a long record in Scandinavian drama, plays a role that seems designed to keep the pressure on Elvira from above rather than below. Thea Sofie Loch Næss appears as Agnes, the stepsister whose effortless beauty is the fulcrum around which the whole story turns, and Flo Fagerli and Isac Calmroth round out a cast that keeps the period register grounded rather than camp. The ensemble has the feel of actors who understood precisely what kind of film they were making, which, given the demands of the material, is no small thing.
Cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, who also shares the editing credit with Olivia Neergaard-Holm (an unusual dual role, and one that tends to produce a particularly unified visual rhythm), gives the film a look that sits somewhere between the candlelit warmth of classic fairy-tale illustration and something colder and more clinical. The images have a period texture on the surface but a modern unease running underneath, which suits the material exactly. The score is credited to both John Erik Kaada and Vilde Tuv, a pairing that produces something with folk-inflected strings and a more unsettling, dissonant undertow that surfaces when the body horror takes hold. It is the kind of score that flatters the silence around it as much as it fills the room. The film runs to 109 minutes and the cutting, shaped by both Zyskind and Neergaard-Holm, has a patience to it, building pressure without releasing it cheaply. For comparisons in tone, it is worth noting that Nymphomaniac: Vol. I and Only God Forgives have both appeared on this blog as touchstones for Scandinavian and Nordic-adjacent cinema that refuses to make things comfortable for its audience, and The Ugly Stepsister belongs to that same tradition of films content to sit with their own discomfort.
Fairy tales have always had a cruel streak, and The Ugly Stepsister goes looking for it with a scalpel.
Emilie Blichfeldt's Norwegian debut retells Cinderella from the other side of the mirror, following Elvira (Lea Myren), the so-called ugly stepsister, as she sets about remaking herself into something the prince might finally want. It is a period fairy tale reimagined as body horror, and it mines the gap between the pretty story we all know and the Grimm-dark savagery lurking beneath it for everything it is worth.
Body horror is not usually my genre; the likes of Tetsuo tend to leave me cold rather than queasy, so it says something that this one got so far under my skin. The horror here is toe-curlingly, and I do mean that quite literally, hard to watch, yet it is superbly handled, never gratuitous (well, rarely) and always in service of the point.
It sits in the same disquieting territory as The Substance, another film I rated highly, in which a woman submits to grotesque lengths in pursuit of the beauty the world insists she owes it. Both understand that the real horror is not the gore, but the reasons anyone would ever choose it.
It is a slow burn, but a rewarding one, tightening the screws with real patience before the payoff lands. Along the way it is visceral, raw and, cleverest of all, sharp as a tack about the absurd, painful lengths people will go to in the name of beauty; this is social commentary of the best sort, the kind that makes its case through your gut rather than a speech. (One very odd aside: this is now the second Northern European film I have caught lately, after Lithuania's Toxic, to make grim use of a tapeworm. I had no idea they were having such a moment.)
Blichfeldt announces herself here as a real talent, and does so with a debut that is confident, controlled and gleefully nasty in all the right places. It will not be for the squeamish, there were moments I watched through my fingers, but if you can stomach it, this is smart, striking, socially pointed horror of a high order. Four stars, and one of the more memorable modern horrors I have seen in a good while.
The Ugly Stepsister arrives in a moment when the horror genre is doing some of its most interesting thinking about femininity and the social performance of beauty, and Blichfeldt's film holds its own in that company without feeling like a pale imitation. For audiences happy to range across Nordic cinema's broader currents, it sits naturally alongside work reviewed here such as Village at the End of the World and Bye Bye Blue Bird, films that find real unease in communities and rituals that look, from the outside, entirely ordinary. As a debut, it is polished but never safe, and it makes a persuasive case that the most disturbing thing about the fairy tale was never the witch. It was always the mirror.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2026-08-22
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Ugly Stepsister (2025) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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