‘The Ugly Stepsister' Review: Nipped, Tucked and Royally Fussed Over

New York Times

17-04-2025

During the opening credits of 'The Ugly Stepsister,' the camera pans slowly across an abandoned wedding feast, the food gooey and gluttonous. The aging groom has dropped dead and his new wife, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), has learned that the fortune she expected does not exist. Instead, she has acquired a stunning stepdaughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), and the immediate need for a replacement benefactor.
To that end, Rebekka's elder daughter, Elvira (Lea Myren), must marry the picture-book Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). Unlike Agnes, Elvira is gawky and gauche, her teeth wrapped in metal braces and her body less than lithe. But with the help of a cocaine-snorting plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren), she can be remade in time for the grand ball where Julian will choose his bride. All that's needed is a hammer, a chisel and a hungry tapeworm.
Like last year's 'The Substance,' this fleshy folk horror forces us to look — in unsparing, often revolting close-up — at the physical agony of aesthetic conformity. Yet the movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical. One minute, a tribe of maggots is feasting on the expired groom's rotting corpse; the next, they're weaving a silken ball gown.
And oh, those gowns! Designed by Manon Rasmussen (a favorite of Lars von Trier), the film's costumes are delicious. At the ball, mothers display their preening, bedazzled daughters like show dogs; but the camera's real interest lies in the flesh beneath the finery, in the plump swellings of belly and buttocks and the defenseless innocence of soon-to-be-chopped toes.
Contrasting the freshness of youth with the decay of a world where beauty is the only currency and romance an illusion, 'The Ugly Stepsister' strikes gold in Myren's extraordinary performance. As Elvira's dreams are dashed and her body mutilated, we feel for her: Like all of us, she just wants to be loved. And, of course, rich.