The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) started life as a film about a woman with a talking vulva. Then writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt decided to come at the same idea – the onerous demands put on young women – by taking a second run at the Cinderella fairy tale. The resulting debut feature introduces a really gifted director to a wider audience, though the film itself could learn a lesson from Cinderella herself – it’s the dainty foot that gets into the glass slipper, not the galumphing one.
It’s the same story, just slanted so we see it from the point of view of the loser – in this case Elvira (Lea Myren), the ugly stepsister who gains the upper hand over the much more naturally beautiful Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), when Agnes’s newly remarried father (Ralph Carlsson) unexpectedly dies, leaving Elvira’s mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) in charge of the household.
Power relations shift and favoured Agnes is suddenly busted down to scullery duty while Elvira – a girl who has grown up on stories about handsome princes – sets out to beautify herself with painful procedures so she can win the hand/heart of the local ruler’s most eligible son.
We all know how this ends up and Blichfeldt pulls no real surprises, which is a bit of a surprise in itself, since she favours the naturally gifted Agnes over the try-hard Elvira. Poor Elvira, you end up feeling sorry for her until she goes too far and loses whatever sympathy she’s gained.
For her part, Næss’s Agnes isn’t entirely the sweet, cinder-spattered victim. A little wilful, a touch haughty, and happy to give up her true love (the stable boy) in an attempt to win the prince and save the family. There’s some nobility in that gesture, admittedly.
Blichfeldt says she was influenced to some extent by the body horror of David Cronenberg and Julia Ducournau, and in scenes where Elvira is receiving a medieval nose job at the end of a hammer and chisel or is having eyelash extensions sewn onto her eyelids you can believe it.
She also claims to have been influenced by Václav Vorlíček’s Three Wishes for Cinderella, a Czech/East German co-production from from 1973 routinely watched at Christmas in some European countries. Aping its classic look and straightahead style, The Ugly Sister has a muted old-school aesthetic, though a maggoty corpse and erect penis never featured in Three Wishes as they do here, nor did Vorlíček’s film feature dance numbers of a Busby Berkley meets tai chi sort.
The unspoken influence is Lucile Hadzhihalilovic, who’s been making films about the mis-education – miss education? – of young women since her debut, Innocence. In fact her most recent film, The Ice Tower, took a similar crack at another fairy story, The Snow Queen. Perhaps a between-the-lines influence, Hadzhihalilovic seems to be hovering in the background in every scene.
There’s a lot in this film, too much really, for an easy updating on a familiar story, but it’s full of good things – the thankless performance by Lea Myren, who is asked to pull us in, push us out and then pull us back in again as sympathy flows tidally towards and away from Elvira. The quietly excellent Flo Fagerli as Elvira’s blameless sister Alma – a whole unexplored world exists in her performance. And Ane Dahl Torp as Rebekka – a wicked queen meets stage mother and the real villain of this piece.
I think Blichfeldt is a great film-maker but this isn’t a great film. She’s kitchen-sinked things a touch too much and there’s a favouring of back-and-forth editing over simple old-fashioned (and truer to her sources) things like the two-shot.
A quibble? Nit-picking? Yeh, probably. The Ugly Stepsister is well worth a look, probably more than one.
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
