The Ugly Stepsister (2025) Review: Beauty Has a Body Count

There’s a particular cruelty in calling someone an ugly stepsister by default. We already know whom to love, whom to laugh at, and whose humiliation counts as a happy ending. Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister asks us to examine the girl the fairy tale taught us to ignore. I expected a grotesque joke at her expense. Instead, I found it a funny, sickening, unexpectedly sympathetic film about how badly a person can crave acceptance.

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Elvira (Lea Myren) arrives in a new household with her mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), and younger sister, Alma (Flo Fagerli). Her new stepsister, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), already has the kind of beauty one might expect from a princess. When the family’s finances turn sour, Rebekka sees a solution in the prince’s upcoming ball. If Elvira can attract him, their future is secure. All she has to do is become the kind of girl he might choose.

Of course, “all” is doing horrifying work in that sentence. Elvira was raised on romantic fantasies about Prince Julian, and at first she seems willing to mistake her mother’s project for the realization of her own dream. Rebekka knows better. She assesses her daughter’s face, figure, and prospects with harsh yet practiced eye. Elvira’s body becomes an obstacle to the marriage that could rescue them both.

The film’s early humor stems from the gap between fairy-tale language and practical instruction. A princess should be beautiful. Fine. Who will pay for it, and how much pain will she endure? Here, refinement involves invasive procedures, bodily discipline, and the constant possibility of failure. The person doing the improving is expected to smile through the process.

The nose procedure is a good example. There’s an almost comic directness to the promise that a face can be fixed through physical force. The sound and texture of the scene pull beauty down from an ideal to the level of cartilage and bone. Later, the work on Elvira’s eyelashes performs a similar trick. What might look delicate from across a ballroom becomes unbearable when we’re close enough to imagine the sensation. I loved how firmly the practical effects commit to that difference in scale.

Elvira eventually turns to a tapeworm to manage her weight. That development could have been played as a stunt designed only to make the audience squirm (at which it succeeds). Yet it also extends the film’s nastiest idea: even hunger must be made useful. Appetite is just another problem to be engineered out of her. I was reminded of Swallow, where the body functions as a site of control and desperate resistance. Elvira’s methods are different, but her apparent choices are shaped by a world that has made ordinary bodily existence intolerable.

Myren makes those scenes work because she never plays Elvira as a rube. Elvira can be vain, foolish, jealous, and unkind. She can also be painfully sincere. She wants romance, attention, and a place in the story. It would be easy to regard her competition with Agnes as the film’s centerpiece. The deeper relationship is with Rebekka. Elvira is far more a victim of her mother’s ambitions than of Cinderella’s beauty.

Rebekka doesn’t just impose a standard from outside. She teaches Elvira to monitor herself, then supplies the means of correction. As the treatments get more extreme, motherly concern and financial desperation merge. Elvira can consent to a procedure while having almost no room to imagine refusing the whole system. The film never needs to pretend that she has no agency. Its tragedy comes from watching her exercise that agency against her own body.

Agnes, meanwhile, doesn’t become a saint simply because we know her as Cinderella. That helps. The familiar fairy tale usually asks us to sort women by moral worth before it asks how their lives are arranged. Blichfeldt is more interested in the arrangement. Beauty grants Agnes an advantage, but it also makes her valuable to other people in ways she can’t fully control. Elvira’s resentment has reason, yet it keeps her focused on the nearest woman instead of the bargain that puts them in competition.

There’s a useful comparison with my review of The Scandalous Lady W. Both stories place marriage beside money and treat a woman’s appearance or sexual reputation as something others can appraise. The Ugly Stepsister gives that exchange a physical brutality that’s hard to talk away. Every improvement to Elvira’s prospects leaves a mark on the person whose prospects are supposedly improving.

I also appreciated the film’s dark sense of humor. It can make an elaborate royal ritual look ridiculous without treating Elvira’s belief in it as ridiculous. The prince’s desirability depends on fantasy and social position as much as on anything he actually offers. Watching Elvira prepare herself for his gaze, I found myself wondering how much of her attraction belongs to him and how much belongs to the promised transformation of her life. That uncertainty gives the comedy its edge. We can laugh at the elaborate performance while understanding why she can’t simply walk away from it.

Satin, powdered faces, and carefully arranged rooms create a world that looks inviting from a distance. Up close, everything depends on concealment: money troubles, bodily mess, hunger, pain. The beauty standard isn’t merely enforced by a cruel mother or shallow prince. It’s built into the images through which this society recognizes a person as worthy. Blichfeldt spoke in an interview about reframing the Cinderella story through body horror, and I think that choice gives the familiar tale something fresh. Its magic has a cost somebody has to bear.

The violence often startles, but I never felt the film relied on gore too much. Each escalation follows from a modest-sounding demand: improve this feature, reduce that appetite, look a little closer at the details. No single step has to contain the whole cruelty of the system. The accumulation does it. By the time Elvira is barely recognizable as the girl who arrived with romantic hopes, the transformation feels both outrageous and horribly understandable.

That progression is where the film distinguishes itself from some other recent beauty-horror stories. In The Substance, for example, the image of bodily replacement can sometimes take precedence over the person undergoing it. Blichfeldt’s practical effects are every bit as eager to unsettle us, but Myren keeps drawing me back to Elvira’s private hopes. The sight of her changing is disturbing because I still remember what she always wanted.

I did leave with one wish. I would have loved to see a film this vivid build an entirely original story around the same pressures. The Cinderella framework gives Blichfeldt a ready-made set of expectations to overturn, and she uses it very well. My preference isn’t a complaint, per se. I was simply so taken with Elvira and the film’s own ugly, beautiful world that I wanted them to stand free of any existing work.

That reservation hardly diminishes what’s here. The Ugly Stepsister is a terrific body-horror film, a wicked comedy, and a pointed account of beauty as social power. Its greatest achievement is Elvira herself. The film takes a character generations have been invited to ridicule and lets us see the fear, longing, and obedience beneath. Once I can see her clearly, the old fairy tale becomes much harder to enjoy in the same way.

The Ugly Stepsister (2025) Film Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

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