The Ugly Stepsister: The Brothers Grimm Meets The Substance

Image: Scanbox Entertainment

Emilie Blichfeldt’s fracture-of-a-fairy-tale, The Ugly Stepsister, has arrived on Hulu — a film that’s as visually arresting as it is grim. I expected a faithful turn toward the Brothers Grimm’s harsher contours (the original tale includes grotesque attempts by stepsisters to force themselves into a prince’s shoe), but Blichfeldt delivers something richer: a movie of striking beauty and unsettling moral complexity.

Rather than centering on Cinderella herself (named Agnes here and played by Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the story privileges her eldest stepsister, Elvira (Lea Myren). Their worlds collide when Elvira’s mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), marries Agnes’s father, Otto (Ralph Carlsson), and moves her daughters, Elvira and little Alma (Flo Fagerli), into his grand yet precarious household. Agnes — who welcomes them with naive grace — becomes entangled in the power dynamics that follow.

The newly formed family barely settles before calamity strikes. At a tense post-wedding supper, Otto hurls barbs at Elvira and even tosses cake in her face; she masks her humiliation with a brittle laugh. Minutes later he begins coughing blood and collapses, dead at the table — a moment that lands somewhere between shocking and darkly comic. Blichfeldt’s film often slips into wry humor even as it traffics in gore.

It quickly becomes apparent that Rebekka and Otto’s marriage was a marriage of convenience — neither truly possesses wealth. With creditors at the door and the family home at risk of repossession, Rebekka pins her hopes on a single solution: a royal match. Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) and his father are hosting a ball to find a suitable bride, and Rebekka resolves to groom both Agnes and Elvira for the prize. Alma, the youngest, is mercifully spared much of this scheming — she even conceals her first period to avoid being dragged into her mother’s plans.

Elvira daydreams of Julian long before invitations arrive; earning a place at the ball becomes an obsession. She is willing to endure extreme measures — starving herself, submitting to painful procedures — to conform to the period’s brutal standards of beauty. But the field is formidable.

Agnes embodies the classical ideal: tall, blonde, effortlessly elegant. Elvira, meanwhile, is presented as plain within the film’s world despite her intrinsic beauty. The movie follows a familiar trajectory: braces, awkward hair, and social scorn before a so-called transformation. Rebekka takes Elvira to a physician to remove her braces, but the doctor proceeds to break and “reset” her petite nose. Elvira spends much of the story wearing a harrowing leather device to reshape her face — a contraption that makes her look even more grotesque than before.

Rebekka enrolls the girls in etiquette lessons that feel less about table manners and more about sculpting bodies to conform. There, the rivalry between Agnes and Elvira sharpens: Agnes is ushered to the front row; Elvira is shuffled to the margins with the other “unattractive” girls. In a desperate bid to slim down, Elvira even ingests a tapeworm, an act that strips weight but also ravages her health and hair. At points the film evokes echoes of other recent body-horror satires — yet Blichfeldt’s sensibility remains distinct, leaning toward a bittersweet, humanistic close rather than pure punishment.

Loch Næss’s Agnes is a standout: not a wide-eyed idealist but a pragmatic young woman who understands the stakes of her family’s plight. Her beauty is both asset and burden; many around her reduce her worth to her looks alone. She isn’t in love with the prince — a selfish, cruel young man who mocks Elvira — and instead finds unexpected tenderness with a humble stable hand. Elvira, by contrast, romanticizes Julian despite his cruelty, preferring the imagined gentleman of her fantasies to the real, callous figure he reveals himself to be.

The film’s finale is paradoxically brutal and oddly consoling. There are many queasy moments — including an infamous toe-mutilation sequence — but Blichfeldt balances those shocks with moments of uncanny beauty. One such scene finds Agnes mourning her father’s corpse; without funds for a proper burial, Otto’s body becomes host to silkworms that in turn repair and transform Agnes’s ruined gown into something wondrous and otherworldly — a sequence that feels like it might have been dreamt up by a gothic fantasist.

While the film boasts accomplished body-horror effects and striking cinematography, its greatest achievement is the emotional space it affords both Agnes and Elvira. Rather than merely condemning women who chase impossible standards, Blichfeldt interrogates how internalized misogyny corrodes bonds between women. Where some recent films focus on punitive spectacle, The Ugly Stepsister offers a more measured, almost hopeful finale that ultimately elevates sisterhood and empathy.

The Ugly Stepsister is streaming on Hulu, AMC Plus, and Shudder, and is available for digital rental on Amazon.

Source: Polygon