I’ve watched the trailer for Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister over 5 times now. It all started when my best friend sent me the trailer on Instagram and I was immediately intrigued. The idea of reworking Cinderella into a horror movie from the perspective of one of her stepsisters sounded like an excellent way of embracing the story’s grim (pun very much intended) roots. Past versions of the tale have featured cannibalism and various forms of mutilation, yet the classic Disney film has remained the prevalent iteration. Aside from Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods, I had yet to see a Cinderella story that fully leaned into the gory elements that existed alongside the pumpkin carriages and fairy godmothers.
As a bass beat punctuates the trailer, questions start to flash on screen:
“Do you ever feel inferior? Unworthy? Ashamed? Rejected? Invisible?” and finally “Ugly?”
The last word, which continues to flash on screen as the titular stepsister, Elvira (Lea Myren) sits down in front of her vanity. Elvira herself is far from being ugly. Myren is a very pretty actress who looks like she could play Anya Taylor-Joy’s younger sister. But this movie isn’t called The Already Pretty Stepsister, so certain steps have to be taken in order to let audiences know that Elvira is indeed the ugly stepsister.
Frankly, Elvira’s mother lives up to the title of Evil Stepmother because she’s decided to stick this poor girl with an obnoxious pile of sausage curls overflowing her head and completely overwhelming her soft, delicate features while throwing copious amounts of stiff, brown fabric onto her small frame. The torture is topped with a stack of bows that look like a mess of whipped cream atop this Kibbe system nightmare. Of course, all of this serves to emphasize the beauty of our Cinderella, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess).
Agnes appears to us looking perfectly put together with her historically inaccurate half-ponytail with relaxed beachwaves and her simple yet elegant pale blue dress, which only makes her bright blue eyes stand out. Brief shots of half-eaten cakes and cinnamon rolls crammed into drawers, a close-up shot of Elvira’s stomach, and glimpses of her braces are further meant to alert audiences that Elvira is, in fact, ugly. It’s not enough that (for some reason) her clothes are unflattering to her features, but apparently, her body is also far from the ideal that Agnes apparently embodies.Elvira is not ugly, but she just happens to have all of the supposed signifiers of ugliness. The only reason why she does not appear as put-together as Agnes is that her mother is possessed by the vengeful spirit of a stylist who’s obsessed with heaping bows and curls onto a petite person with pixie-like features. As for her body, Elvira barely looks any different from any of the other girls in her dance class. Sure, the camera focuses on her stomach after eating one of the several sweets hidden in her drawers, but it’s nothing abnormal or shocking. By all means, it is a completely normal body. So when we see Elvira’s nose gruesomely cracked open by a terrifying plastic surgeon (appropriately named Dr. Esthetique), it hurts in more ways than one.
It’s an image that is all too familiar. A girl who looks perfectly fine, even pretty if only her mother would stop, insisted on pairing sausage curls with gigantic bows, going to extreme lengths to completely change everything about herself rather than emphasizing the beauty that is already there. Unfortunately, for many people, and especially young women, these are the types of growing pains that we experience.
A ScreenRant review by Mae Abdulbaki describes how beauty in this world is viewed:“As a performance, as status, as a means to attract and remain valuable in the eyes of society." Beauty is essentially a currency amongst women, and the extensive procedures that Elvira puts herself through are the labor needed to earn it. She screams in pain with blood leaking from her eyes after having false eyelashes directly sewn onto her eyelids, all for the attention of Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). The film is listed as a horror-comedy, but those who identify with Elvira’s struggles know that it is truly a tragedy. One review that flashes on screen during the trailer calls the film “savagely brutal and yet strangely beautiful.” A description that is ironic, given the way that Blichfeldt’s intentions seem to be to rip beauty standards apart limb from limb, as blood spatters onto a horrified audience. Personally, I’m all for it. If Elvira’s torture feels visceral (one audience member threw up during one sequence during its Cannes showing), that’s because it is forcing the audience to feel what nearly every young girl has had to feel on the inside as she grew up. “Savagely brutal and yet strangely beautiful.”
While it may even be frustrating to see Elvira viciously mutilating herself for the attention of one man she barely knows, how many of us have been like her? Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney) has faced similar criticism for the insanely intricate morning routine she subjects herself to just to gain a little bit of attention from Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi). But unless you can confidently admit to yourself that you’ve never gone to any lengths just for the attention of a crush, none of us is any better.
Even without a romantic interest, we live in a society that immediately judges people based on their physical appearances. Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz write how “it is acknowledged that many women willingly engage in ‘beauty rituals’ and perceive being (or becoming) beautiful as empowering, not oppressive.” This idea is made more complex with the frequent promotion of “self-care” and “wellness” by social media. We may not view multi-step skincare routines or smoothie recipes as beauty rituals because they have been wrapped in the idea that it is being done for yourself. But, let’s be honest here, “wellness” has simply replaced “beautiful,” and it is not a coincidence that the expected outcome of following these rituals is a “glow-up” in the form of a slimmer body, smoother skin, and more voluminous hair. These rituals are meant to lead to the achievement of beauty standards.
“The social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous.”
On the other end of the spectrum is the unfairly gorgeous Agnes. Silently judging Elvira while looking effortlessly ethereal in an Elle-Fanning-as-Sleeping-Beauty type of way. Although she meets beauty standards in a way that Elvira does not, she, too, is dependent on her beauty to move herself forward in the world. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther folklore index categorizes Cinderella under type 510A — Persecuted Heroine. While it would have been easy to place Agnes/Cinderella into the role of villain to Elvira’s persecuted heroine, Agnes is not any better off. As previously mentioned, beauty is a currency, and Agnes only happens to have an abundance of it.
As a young woman without a father or a dowry, Agnes must rely on her pretty privilege to catch the attention of the wealthy prince. According to Sable Yong for Time Magazine, “the social advantages of pretty privilege are many: good-looking people come off smart, capable, trustworthy, and generally morally virtuous.” Elvira temporarily gains this advantage sometime after she swallows a tapeworm egg to eat away her body weight, and her hair begins to fall out in clumps. Whether she likes it or not, she has become beautiful. But it’s still not enough. Yong writes that pretty privilege “calls for a kind of beauty that appears convincingly ‘natural’ in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue.” As painful as those procedures may have been, it is no match for the beauty that Agnes was born with.
“A kind of beauty that appears convincingly ‘natural’ in order to imbue positive associations of goodness and moral virtue.” The penultimate moment comes when Elvira holds up a meat cleaver, preparing to chop off her toes. Besides the moment when the slipper fits Cinderella, this is one of the most famous scenes of the Cinderella story. Elvira has gone through hell and back to forge herself into the living doll that she thought the prince wanted. But Agnes, even with her face obscured, has managed to destroy everything that she has worked towards. When we see her glaring down at her own foot, there is a sense that it was never just for the prince. The whole world has told Elvira that in order to be valued, she must be beautiful. All of those surgeries and procedures were ways of punishing herself for failing to embody beauty standards in the same way that Agnes does. But we all know how the story of Cinderella ends. Only one stepsister will get her happily ever after.