Although both of the Brothers Grimm died around 1860, they still insist on getting dozens of film and TV credits in each decade of our present age. They might be seen, in a sense, as inventing the modern horror movie far more than Poe or Shelley or Stoker – largely because of their stories’ especially swingeing violence.
It’s therefore not giving much away to report that The Ugly Stepsister, a Norwegian horror take on Cinderella, climaxes as feet are stuffed into slippers after toes have been lopped off with a cleaver. That, after all, is what happens in the Grimm version (and is highlighted, by the way, in the movie’s trailer).
Most of us, of course, were brought up on the decorous Charles Perrault saga of Cinders from the 17th century, but a panto performance full of six-year-olds and a bloody Grimm-style effort in the bowels of a multiplex at least have one thing in common – there’s quite a lot of screaming in both.
Emilie Blichfeldt plunges into her inversion of the so-called fairy-tale with the gleeful attention to misfortune that might have been seen in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm of 2005 or the trashier dope-themed Grimm Tales from 2013 (the title of which was unaccountably changed from Hansel and Gretel Get Baked). Her debut feature also promises the same kind of feminist body horror as the lauded Titane (2021) and The Substance (2024), both from French women directors. But if the body horror is present, the messaging from Norway turns out to be a bit more mixed up.
In 19th-century Scandinavia, Elvira (Lea Myren) is the “ugly” daughter of a rapacious ma (Ane Dahl Torp) who takes a rich guy for a new husband, only to see him expire into a large cake shortly after the start. We might assume that doltish protagonist Elvira is to be our gimcrack Cinderella as the mother and Elvira’s new stepsister, the radiant Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), set about putting her through a beauty boot camp to prepare her for the upcoming Prince’s ball, where the top local nob (and knob-head), played by Isac Calmroth, will select a bride.
Teeth and a bumpy nose need to be fixed on Elvira with pliers and a chisel and no benefit of ether. But Elvira is more or less up for these trials as she has an absurd crush on the Prince and his dopey-doggerel book of poems. Blichfeldt knows how to devote more cinematic care than any audience could possibly want to the obligatory, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding set-pieces of pain, nowhere more than when the family’s mad French plastic surgeon threads false lashes onto Elvira’s eyelids with a fish hook. It leaves her looking like something out of A Clockwork Orange, with an attitude to match, and by now the film is messing with whatever sympathies we have left.
After immaculate Agnes is caught bonking a stable boy, Elvira and her mum gang up on her and Agnes is set to work skivvying and hearth-sweeping and being called, with no obvious sarcasm, “Cinderella” – setting us on a more-or-less familiar path for the royal ball to come.
Elvira, flipped to the mean side, goes full-on tonto; and Blichfeldt, in searching for an original innards-exploding device for her, comes up with tapeworms, which the witless girl ingests to lose weight as if it’s Victorian Ozempic. (The worm egg she swallows looks like a translucent lentil, a legume that features in the old Grimm story.)
But the wriggly comestible doesn’t deliver the same yuk moments we saw in The Substance, and this arthouse tale of beauty and butchery rations its shocks at carefully parcelled 15-minute intervals. The script second-guesses itself so much that there’s not enough space for many of the key characters to develop, without fixing the logic issues of the fairy-tale originals. The delicate cinematography of Marcel Zyskind delivers misty pastels everywhere amid the lace, bustles, bows and fluttered fans, while even the gore is a lustrous ruby-red.
The sequences that are the most effective in subverting beauty myths, male gazes and feminine mystiques are those set in a finishing school dance class, where ringleted girls struggle to make themselves into “noble virgins” for the Prince’s ball. Without the need for grue and splurge, amid the galumphing and toppling, we witness the impossibility, and general undesirability, of transforming flesh and blood into weightless, ethereal fantasy.
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