Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister

Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you, the tnmn community.

Last week’s category: I’ll Have What She’s Having. That is, films where you wish the plot would happen to you in real life. The results are posted to our website and Letterboxd account every week.

This week, submit your favorite road trip movies. Reply to this email with your favorite road trip movie and why we should watch it. We’ll feature your submission in next week’s newsletter.

Note: If your submission doesn't comply with the category, I’ll bring my dog to your house and have her pee on your lawn. She’ll think she owns your house because she’ll have marked it as her territory (duh). But also, her pee has a high concentration of nitrogen and salt. This is a problem because it will kill your grass. Your lawn will be an embarrassment, and the deed to your house will be nothing but a formality. You and I will both know that Olive owns your house — not you. So, ya know. Follow the category.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A brutal Norwegian-language reimagining of the Cinderella fairy tale, told from the perspective of Elvira, the stepsister.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

▶ Harps and synths. The score is effervescent, dreamlike. At times reminiscent of Giallo classics like Suspiria.

▶ Gross stuff, but also social commentary. Like, when horror films bring attention to societal injustices but also make you want to close your eyes a bunch. Because, yuck.

▶ Gothic tales. The visual language, sets, and costuming — it’s all so ornate and dark and, well, gothic.

▶ Erect weiners. I’m sort of kidding. But there are like, three erect penises in this film. Which is more than I’ve seen in most films. It almost made me wonder if there’s some sort of regulation that prevents erect penises from appearing in non-pornographic U.S. films.¹

What I liked about it.

It feels to me that every few years, a Disney character enters the public domain. The latest, by my recollection, are Winnie the Pooh and the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.²

Like clockwork, within days of a new Disney character becoming public property, a friend sends me a campy horror film trailer making use of the freshly minted public property. For the two mentioned above, see Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and Screamboat.

Though I admittedly have an appreciation for the comedy of public domain antics like this, what I’d wish upon a star instead is something more like what writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt puts together in The Ugly Stepsister, her feature-length debut.

The Ugly Stepsister is a dark gothic tale inspired by The Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella — also in the public domain. The subversive narrative is notably focused on the stepsister’s pursuit of the prince who — we all know from the fairy tale — eventually weds Cinderella.

The film, screened at Sundance Film Festival in 2025, serves up twisted, elevated body horror that begs for comparison with 2024’s critical darling, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance.³

Lea Myren plays Elvira, the titular stepsister, as a doe-eyed dreamer, willing to go great lengths in pursuit of beauty and wealth.

At the start of the film, her performance is an exercise in restraint. Micro-expressions and close-up work. Long-held gazes, often trained on objects of her desire, suggest a teenage fantasist at work. Though, these very same gazes, when in front of a mirror, become wordless criticisms and self-hatred.

As Elvira settles into her disturbing pursuit of beauty in hopes of courting the prince, Myren skillfully layers in envy, contempt, and obsession into her interactions with her peers. She puts together quite the physical performance as her character willingly undergoes increasingly hellish procedures to perfect her image.

Blichfeldt worked with Manon Rasmussen on costume design, who worked on all of the Lars von Trier films. The costumes are ornate and eccentric; and it’s apparent Blichfeldt is more invested in costuming than the average filmmaker. This is, hands down, some of the best costuming work I’ve seen in recent years.

More than most, Blichfeldt's direction is clear-eyed. She leans hard into the satirical elements. Male characters at royal banquets revel in crude innuendo like extras in a straight-to-DVD sequel to American Pie.

By coupling Myren’s solemn performance with a dreamscape of a score that wouldn’t be out of place in the Disney version of Cinderella, Blichfeldt delivers a blistering contrast that underlines the absurdity of Elvira’s quest.

Impressive is Blichfeldt’s ability to operate above and below the surface throughout the film. She’s practically dancing on the less wholesome legacy of Disney films, which often bolster notions in children that pretty is good and ugly is bad.

Though, I remain tormented by one of the film’s more overt devices. Every procedure that Elvira undergoes in the film is relatively commonplace in modern society. Much of what separates them in the film is the lack of modern anesthetics and far more crude surgical instruments.

So, we’re okay, right? Like, because we have clean white surgery centers and better numbing agents and we get put to sleep. And only then do we allow someone to rearrange the cartilage in our noses or inject us with silicone or collagen. We’re fine?

Enjoy the film.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat”.

▶ Emilie Blichfeldt never watched Cinderella growing up. In her words: “Since my parents didn’t believe in movies, and we didn’t have a movie theater around where I grew up, I never really saw Cinderella. But I grew up with a small Pixi Book of the Brothers Grimm’s version. I was a keen reader. And I remember the whole shebang of the stepsisters cutting off the toes. And also the way they were drawn. I still have all these images, they have never left me. I was struck by all of that.” ⁴

One great line of dialogue from the film.