Thoughts on The Ugly Stepsister

     On Hulu, I watched The Ugly Stepsister, a 2025 Norwegian black comedy/body horror film written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt. The film is a take on the Cinderella fairy tale, told from the perspective of Cinderella's stepsister Elvira (Lea Myren), an average looking girl who is pitted against Cinderella's beauty, and is forced to undergo painful and archaic methods of plastic surgery to be seen as beautiful enough to win the Prince or any other rich man. Agnes' (later named Cinderella derisively) father marries Elvira's mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), but dies quickly afterwards, and each family thought the other had money, but they are broke, and Rebekka is spending money on finishing school for Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) and Elvira, where the teacher favors the pretty girls, including Agnes, to be at the front of the class and sends Elvira to the back row with the "ugly" girls.

    Elvira is very romantic, and reads love tales supposedly written by Prince Julian, and dreams of being swept up by the Prince, and being made "beautiful" after her braces are taken off and that her nose has healed post-nose job, for which she wears a strap on her face as a bandage for the majority of the film. The nose job is just the doctor breaking her nose with a chisel, causing immeasurable pain to her. She has false eyelashes sewn onto her in a particularly gruesome sequence, and is advised to swallow tapeworm eggs to become thinner, which leaves her with a grumbling stomach sound periodically throughout the film, as a foreboding warning sound inside of her. 

    Elvira is routinely told by her mother and the headmistress that she isn't beautiful and needs to marry a rich man, and Elvira grows envious towards Agnes, whose natural beauty gives her more ease in the world, as well as more suitors, like a stable boy who she has a secret romance with. Agnes starts out a little haughty towards her stepfamily, but is otherwise a nice girl, and is forced into servitude by Rebekka, seeing her as competition for the Prince's affections.

    Elvira's younger sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) witnesses all of this pain and abuse that Elvira goes through, and is hiding that she got her period and started bleeding, afraid that her mother too will put her through the same torture cycle.

    The film takes the pain and bloodiness of the original fairy tale, like the lengths to which the stepsister will go to to fit the shoe after the Prince's ball, and is a commentary on the restrictive beauty standards of then and today, punishing girls for not fitting the beauty standards and shaming them for going through the painful efforts, and still not getting it as easy as those who are "naturally" beautiful. 

    I really loved how twisted this film was, taking the darker origins of the fairy tale, and creating a sympathetic character in the "ugly" stepsister, while not turning Agnes/Cinderella into the villain and showing how she was victimized too. The ending is at both bittersweet and heroic, as Elvira suffers for her quest for beauty and love, but finds safety with Alma to escape their mother's cruelness at the same time. It's a really fantastic film, and I heard of it through the YouTuber Yhara Zayd on her list of her favorite films of 2025.