A bloody tale of Cinderella’s stepsister, who really wants to be pretty. Emilie Blichfeldt’s body horror was screened at the 2025 Sundance and Berlin film festivals.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom where beauty was the main virtue, there lived a girl called Elvira (Lea Myren). She read a lot of fairy tales and dreamt of marrying a prince, but people told her she was ugly and no man would ever want to marry her. To set things straight, Elvira turned to plastic surgery, sewed eye-lashes onto her eyelids and even swallowed tapeworms to lose weight. We know that the prince chose Cinderella over her in the end, but what other torture was Elvira willing to accept to try and take her place?
As dark as it is funny, the film switches between a fairy tale and a horror story, the beautiful and the repulsive, time and again removing the attractive cover from ugly things and attitudes. This striking debut feature by Emilie Blichfeldt (who also wrote the screenplay) criticizes the idea of having to suffer for beauty, the equation between the beautiful and the good, and the unrealistic expectations that women face in our society. She clearly sides not with Cinderella but with her hapless stepsister, explaining that she can better relate to the despair of a girl unable to match the beauty standards of her time than the naive dream of being chosen.
The film will be screened in Norwegian with Russian subtitles.
The Ugly Stepsister
Director: Emilie Blichfeldt
Norway, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, 2025. 100 min
18+