Who Knew a Feminist Reimagining of ‘Cinderella’ Could Be So Gory?

PARK CITY, Utah—Reimagining Cinderella as a horror-comedy about the misery women endure to be attractive in the hopes of catching men’s eyes, The Ugly Stepsister—which just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival—assumes an alternate POV and piles on the gore, but says merely muddled things about vanity and misogyny.

As a crude plastic surgeon’s sign overtly announces, beauty is pain in this fairy tale, and young Elvira (a captivating Lea Myren) is more than willing to stomach it so long as she has a shot at royalty. Alas, what she learns is a rather obvious and pedestrian lesson, if one that’s embellished with a few memorably macabre sights.

In a distant land, Elvira, her sister Alma (Flo Fagerli), and their mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) arrive at the manor house of Otto (Ralph Carlsson), whom Rebekka is set to marry. Otto has a lovely blonde daughter named Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) who doesn’t look too kindly upon her stepmother and stepsiblings, and her fortunes take a nosedive when Otto suddenly dies on his wedding night, leaving her at the mercy of her new relatives.

For Rebekka, however, the real tragedy isn’t the loss of her sugar daddy but the revelation that he was penniless. As a result, she eagerly humors Elvira’s fantasies of marrying local Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), whose book of poetry she religiously reads when not clutching it to her bosom and indulging in fantasies about him sweeping her off her feet to transport her into a future of wealth, romance, and bliss.

Elvira’s problem is that she’s the title character of The Ugly Stepsister: Her complexion is blotchy, her hair is a mess, and her teeth are encased in unsightly metal braces. Thanks to her fondness for cakes, she also has a supposedly doughy figure, although the evidence on display in an early nude scene—in which she inspects her body, unflatteringly, in the mirror—seemingly contradicts this portrayal.

Nonetheless, Norwegian writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt’s point is clear, and it continues to be so as Elvira is put through the surgical makeover grinder. To combat her weight, a finishing school headmistress (Cecilia Forss) has her ingest a tapeworm. To deal with her smile, her braces are removed with giant metal pliers. And to correct her imperfect profile, her nose is broken with a hammer and pick, leaving her with a swollen and bloodied proboscis that she covers with a metal snout affixed to her face via head straps, making her look like an iron-masked monster.

After Agnes is caught screwing the stableboy in the barn (complete with close-ups of his erect member and its gooey ejaculate), she’s officially consigned to serve as the household’s domestic Cinderella. Elvira, meanwhile, suffers the slings and arrows of her dance instructor (Katarzyna Herman) and eats whatever she can find to satisfy her constantly gurgling stomach—the byproduct of the tapeworm’s insatiable appetite.

It’s all quite ghastly and Blichfeldt drenches it in a wispy haziness that complements the action’s sense of lavish decay. An early pan across a dinner table that’s decorated with flowers, feathers, and candles, and which ends with the sight of Otto’s dead face, sums up the film’s gone-to-seed aesthetics, as well as the underlying corruption of this voracious milieu.

In its Grand Guignol depiction of Elvira’s painful cosmetic ordeal, The Ugly Stepsister appears to think it’s being funny, yet there’s little actual humor to its tale, which more or less follows Cinderella’s narrative template.

The tweaks to that formula include Cinderella’s mother serving as her fairy godmother and her blue dress—torn to shreds by a mad-with-jealousy Elvira—being repaired by maggots instead of silkworms. A variety of other touches similarly contribute to its off-kilter squishiness. At the same time, Elvira’s early forest encounter with Prince Julian and his buddies indicates that he might not be the ideal hunk she imagined, what with him telling his pals that he has no preference when it comes to his women being virgins or whores—and that the castle is out of butter because he’s been busy using it as a sexual lubricant.

While Myren’s Elvira isn’t blind to the appalling nature of her circumstances, she’s so zealously consumed with fulfilling her dream that she’s prepared to go to any lengths to achieve it. This, along with the grisliness of her transformation (which additionally involves stitching fake lashes onto her eyelids), is Blichfeldt’s way of slamming the beauty industrial complex.

Frustratingly, though, the writer/director doesn’t grapple with the fact that women of this era and culture had scant opportunities for self-sufficiency and, thus, options other than to court marriage—a fact that gets in the way of the film’s censure of Elvira’s focus on her exterior. Moreover, it says nothing about the fact that Cinderella, per tradition, winds up with Prince Julian despite his well-dramatized loutishness.

The problem, it seems, is that there’s no way to fully transform Cinderella into a feminist critique if Cinderella still gets her customary happily-ever-after; so long as her beauty and goodness (which are equated) win the day, how wrong can Elvira and her compatriots be for thinking that using their physical attributes to woo (awful) men is the surest path to money, comfort, and love?

Elvira pouts, fumes, and mutilates herself in a vain attempt to get what she wants, and Blichfeldt certainly damns Rebekka for perpetuating a paradigm that leads only to self-destruction and misery. Yet because the film’s arguments about sexist standards are apparent from the start and simply reiterated in ever-nastier forms, there’s a depressing lack of surprise to the proceedings. It’s just a waiting game to see how far The Ugly Stepsister will push things. The answer, it turns out, is reasonably far, and at least its revolting final set pieces bring its themes to memorable life.

Classic fairy tales are rife with bad examples and even worse messages, especially for young girls, but The Ugly Stepsister never fully reckons with the core rot of Cinderella and its ilk. Uninterested in confronting all its source material’s gender and beauty-related assumptions and conclusions, it’s a modern riff that’s content to stay on the surface.