It is, I suppose, expected that in an era of social media where everyone tries to project the "best possible version" of themselves, we will be treated more and more to body horror films. Viewers still sweetly reeling from Carolie Fargeat’s 2024 "The Substance" will welcome Emilie Blichfeldt’s "The Ugly Stepsister." I must warn viewers, however, that if you are a bit on the squeamish side like me, keep your viewing to the smaller screens – but view it you must.
For those (women) with lively imaginations and associations, the title "The Ugly Stepsister" already conjures up so many images. It refers to one of the two – need I say it is the Cinderella story we’re talking about – ugly stepsisters who thought they had a chance with the prince, but then the goodie two shoes (or one shoe?) Cinderella must take the prize away. Like many other fairy tales of my childhood, "Cinderella" had always provoked uneasy thoughts – no doubt due to the traces of their darker origins, obscured by their being turned into bedtime stories for children. I remember feeling uneasy for the "ugly" stepsisters, and when I saw them turned into animated films, they always looked more like me than the perfect Cinderella.
In Blichfeldt’s version, what makes the ugly stepsister Elvira’s story more unfortunate is that she is in love with the Prince, whose book of poems she reads religiously. We see her, a bit like Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland in "Northanger Abbey," fantasizing about him declaring his love for her and riding on his horse in misty forests. Elvira has a plump face, brown baby curls and braces on her teeth. She comes to the town of the Prince with her sister and mother on their mother’s attempt to marry a rich man who happens to have an essentially blond, beautiful daughter. On his death it is revealed that the stepfather is as poor as Elvira’s family, and so again, in Jane Austen fashion, the girls must marry rich to save the family.
Prospects come in the shape of the Prince giving a ball and inviting all "virgins" to attend, and so the girls start getting ready. When the messenger comes to deliver the invitation, the daughter of the manor, Agnes, gives her very long surname. When the messenger asks Elvira she, having lost her dad and then her stepdad, doesn’t quite know what to answer and so Agnes introduces her as "the stepsister," reminding us of the regime through which characters get named in stories.
While the film may be geared to make us feel sorry for the ugly stepsister, we get to see that beautiful women are not that well off either. We learn that Agnes has been having an affair with the stable boy and when Elvira’s mother, the "stepmother" for the purposes of the Cinderella story, discovers this, she is infuriated to see that one of her "assets" has been compromised. She grows into her stepmother role, mistreats Agnes and so Agnes becomes the "Cinderella," the ash girl, the name that we know her by in the fairytale. In the fairy tale, the ugly stepsisters and the heroine are equally unnamed. To be fair, so is the prince.
Just as Cinderella is shown to be not the "perfect girl," the Prince is anything but charming, as we discover with Elvira on one of her jaunts in the forest. She spies the Prince and his friends swearing in the forest and talking about violating girls. Elvira has been left in the forest alone because she has just revealed to her sister how she is planning to lose weight. This scene was especially triggering for me, not for the conventional female struggle against weight gain, but the unspeakable method Elvira was encouraged, by her ballet teacher, to use. It is connected to an ailment that I got to know about in the context of a "public education" video in the 80s and its horror has been living in my mind rent-free for years.
Saved from this rat race is Elvira’s sister Alma, who "has not bled yet" and watches the proceedings from the outside, horrified at the "surgeries" that Elvira is forced, by her mother, to go through to be "beautiful." We see Alma deciding to dress even more tomboyishly than before and spending more time with horses, trying to build herself a different womanhood. And it is this different womanhood that saves both Alma and Elvira in the end.
After all her painful to watch operations, Elvira does turn eyes at the ball and the Prince does find her very beautiful. But when Agnes makes an appearance, all is lost. Then the other triggering moment of the story comes. Even as a child who had sensitive feet, the thought of the "ugly sisters" trying to get their feet into a small shoe would horrify me. In Blichfeldt’s body horror film, this "fitting" is taken to its logical end, and my childhood nightmares are confirmed in front of my very eyes.
To this member of the audience, the film was a plea to let young people feel comfortable in their own bodies and not to encourage "alterations" – like Elvira’s mother and ballet teacher – to find their own (beautiful) self. Blichfeldt makes sure to include the other ugly sister Alma’s path to remind us that there are so many ways of being a woman (or a man), and we should be allowed to be whoever we are without having to cause (physical) harm to ourselves.
