The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) screened at the Overlook Film Festival, 4 April 2025
When, at the beginning of writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren), the widow Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) arrives, along with her daughters 18-year-old Elvira (Lea Myrne) and the premenstrual Alma (Flo Fagerli), to marry the widower Otto (Ralph Carlsson), they are greeted at the steps of the mansion by Otto’s only daughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). Agnes is a natural beauty, and the fluttering doves behind her lend her a Disney-fied look – but then Elvira, despite a certain girlish awkwardness and the braces that her mother both makes her wear and insists that she conceal, is sweet, considerate and far from ugly.
Yet Elvira is the ugly stepsister of the film’s title, and in this reimagining of the Cinderella myth, told unusually from Elvira’s point of view, we see how the standards of beauty imposed on her by her mother and by society at large, and eventually swallowed and internalised by Elvira herself, will gradually expose a deep ugliness and rot within. Indeed, after Otto, on the very day of his marriage, slumps dead over the dining table (having just, with no good reason beyond male, paternal privilege, humiliated Elvira), the film’s opening titles, in bright pink cursive, will appear over a slow pan across the table’s luxuriously wedding banquet where everything is revealed to be mouldy or putrescent. Otto too, just now the newly remarried head of the household, will soon be laid out to decompose, unburied, in his own home. There is indeed something rotten in the state of Swedenland.
“I want to marry him, I really do,” says Elvira to Agnes of the local Prince Julian (Isac Clamroth). Elvira has never laid eyes on, let alone met, the Prince, but she has read his book of love poems – and the giddily naïve girl has been swept away by the fairytale romance of his verse, even as the more worldly Agnes, herself no virgin and all experience to Elvira’s innocence, recognises allusions in the Prince’s words to his sexualised, phallocentric worldview. Agnes seems destined to catch the Prince’s eye and win his hand at the coming palace ball – and she even has supernatural assistance – but Rebekka has an economic need to marry her own daughter off to the Prince or to one of his wealthy guests, and so sets about giving Elvira the mother of all makeovers with a course of painful cosmetic surgeries (cue the body horror of chiselled nasal bones, sewn eyelids and bloodily shaped feet). “It’s what’s inside that counts,” finishing school teacher Sophie von Kronenberg (Cecilia Forss) reassures Elvira – but she is referring not to Elvira’s inner beauty and good nature, but to the tape worm which she is recommending Elvira ingest as a dietary measure, and which will rot Elvira from within.
All these contradictory lessons about what is required of a woman in a man’s world will tear confused Elvira apart, as her beauty regime ironically transforms her into a grotesque monster of jealousy, resentment and (self-)loathing. Meanwhile her younger sister Alma will look on with horror and come to dread her own menarche for the arrival of womanhood that it betokens. For here women are expected to endure torture, to sacrifice their integrity, and to destroy themselves from the inside, all for the arbitrary and often short-lived pleasure of men. Elvira’s failure to win over the Prince – a failure that is inscribed in this fairytale – may actually be a kind of perverse victory, indeed Elvira and Alma’s best hope for liberation, even if, as they flee for the borders on a horse declared “so beautiful” by Alma, these sisters might still find the insidious forces of patriarchy wherever they go.
Expanded from her short Stesøstra (2020), Blichfeldt’s highly accomplished feature debut deals with the beauty myth, much like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) – except that this is not just a metaphorical but a literal fairytale, where the near impossible struggle of women either to conform to, or to break free from, structural oppression is presented in the registers of both dark fantasy and horror. Here ugliness, like beauty, is a storybook construct, a fiction used to divide and pit women against each other – and the best, perhaps the only, way out of this impossible double bind is the solidarity of (step)sisterhood.
strap: Emilie Blichfeldt’s cruel allegory casts an unusual perspective on the Cinderella fairytale to expose the beauty myth underneath
© Anton Bitel
