Yahoo Lifestyle ‘The Ugly Stepsister’ Review: Scary Scandinavian Cinderella Story Puts the ‘Boo’ in ‘Bibbidi Bobbidi’
Most fairy tales were told and retold countless times before Walt Disney ever got his hands on them, and yet, the sensibility behind such animated classics as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Sleeping Beauty” has proven so popular on such an international scale that few know these stories’ darker origins. The family-friendly studio’s more-wholesome-than-horrifying approach gives Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt plenty of room to push back with “The Ugly Stepsister,” a deliciously extreme take on the beloved “Cinderella” legend, complete with broken noses, severed toes and other gory details befitting the Grimm bros.
Premiering in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival, the graphic (and in many respects, ravishing) update swipes a different page from the Disney playbook: Instead of focusing on the familiar wench-in-waiting, Blichfeldt recenters her version on one of the tale’s iconic antagonists, finding empathy for the pig-nosed, slightly plump stepsister (played by Lea Myren) who’s convinced she’d be a much better match for the bachelor prince’s ardor.
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Named Elvira, the young lady isn’t really ugly — certainly not by the voluptuous ideals reflected in baroque art, which long favored her more healthy-looking physique — but the entire project is meant to challenge the destructive power of such judgments. As such, Myren makes a courageous canvas on which to attempt a series of gruesome “improvements.” There’s no fairy godmother to be found in Blichfeldt’s telling, as both Elivra and Agnes (played by Thea Sofie Loch Næss, a more conventionally attractive Scandinavian stunner) go about their transformations in creative new ways.
Agnes is the Cinderella character here, depicted as a snooty mean-girl type, whose stuck-up attitude undercuts her indisputable good looks. “If it wasn’t for the money, Father wouldn’t have let people like you in,” she scoffs at Elvira, forbidding her new step-sibling from touching her silver brush and other precious things. Meanwhile, guileless Elvira naively confides the crush she has on Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), whose clothbound book of purple poetry appeals to her romantic sensibility.
Indulging Elvira’s fantasy visions from time to time, the film shows the prince as she imagines him — though the real thing is less than charming. Agnes knows better than to idolize such a shallow fellow, saving her affections for a lowly stable boy (Malte Gårdinger). She may have true love, but Agnes’ life is marked by misfortune. First she watches her father keel over, face down, over dessert. Then she’s demoted to a kind of scullery maid, milking the cows and sweeping the floors. In Disney terms, such suffering would surely merit her a “happily ever after” — not like such a concept even exists in this more cynical interpretation.
The way the film presents her, earnest Elvira seems the worthier candidate to marry Julian, who’s invited all the eligible young ladies of the region to a ball, where he aims to decide his bride. Elvira doesn’t have a fancy title (no noble-sounding “von” to follow her name) or the kind of looks that will turn the prince’s head, and so her mother — who is also Agnes’ cruel new stepmom (Agnieszka Zulewska) — begins the makeover process, commissioning quack plastic surgeon Dr. Esthétique (Adam Lundgren) to fix her daughter’s teeth, nose and eyes.
And so the traveling huckster rips off Elvira’s braces and takes a chisel to her schnoz, smashing and resetting the girl’s nose (the poor lass wears an elaborate brass contraption across her face for half the movie as it heals). But Elvira — whose appetite for pastries has given her a pear-shaped figure — is more worried about her weight, accepting a well-meaning tutor’s questionable advice to ingest a tapeworm. “You’re changing your outside to fit what you know is on the inside,” Elvira’s admiring mentor (Cecilia Forss) beams — although improving her self-image seems every bit as grueling as the body horror depicted in “The Substance.”
As comparisons go, “The Ugly Stepsister” boasts the same mix of lush visuals and irreverent sensibility that art-house audiences once found in the work of fairy-tale revisionists Walerian Borowczyk (“The Beast”) and Juraj Herz (“Beauty and the Beast”), minus the perverse misogynist subtext. Here, characters treat “beauty is pain” as a kind of mantra, but it’s clear that Blichfeldt feels for the girls subjected to sadistic surgeries — like the one where Dr. Esthétique sews a pair of false lashes onto Elvira’s eyelids, his needle jousting directly toward the camera lens.
The director fully intends for audiences to cringe, although some of the film’s grislier moments are so excessive, we can’t help laughing. Blichfeldt withholds judgment on Elvira (although one could read the before and after shots of her naked torso as a form of humiliation), attacking instead the punishing “work” she has done. As the film goes on, we find ourselves rooting for Elvira’s success even as we half-want all those efforts to blow up in her face — a reasonable likelihood, considering the appalling way clumps of hair fall out where dainty ringlets once bounced.
The closer Elvira gets to her goal, the more her stomach burbles, signaling that we haven’t seen the last of her tapeworm. Blichfeldt and her team put as much care into the wigs, costumes and gorgeous production design as they do the gross-out effects, which makes for a visually delicious, if frequently disgusting, package. It’s hard to find anyone in Agnes’ run-down castle or the surrounding countryside to admire in a film whose harsh take on human nature presents everyone as a selfish opportunist. Even Agnes, who stands to earn the film an X rating with her carnal extracurricular activities, behaves in ugly ways.
Contrasting how her female characters feel with the expectations men put on them, Blichfeldt makes clear that impossible beauty standards are the unfairest of them all, whether in the real world or this twisted fictional kingdom.
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