The Ugly Stepsister

The Ugly Stepsister (Norwegian: Den Stygge Stesøsteren) is a 2025 satirical^[4][5] black comedy^[6] body horror^[7][8] film written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, in her directorial debut. It stars Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp and Flo Fagerli ; using the motif of the fairy tale "Cinderella", it retells a twisted story of Elvira, who competes against her beautiful stepsister in a bloody battle for beauty.

The film had its world premiere as the opening film of the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on 23 January.^[9][10] It was also screened at the Panorama section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on 16 February.^[11] It was theatrically released in Norway on 7 March by Scanbox Entertainment,^[12] in Denmark on 28 May,^[13] and in Sweden on 13 June.^[14]

It was nominated for the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Award at the 98th Academy Awards.^[15]

A widow, Rebekka, has two ugly daughters named Elvira and Alma. She marries an older widower, Otto, who has a beautiful daughter named Agnes. Otto and Rebekka each hope to become wealthy via the other, only to discover they are both penniless. Agnes behaves haughtily towards her stepmother and stepsisters for their relatively low social status, however Elvira, in awe of her stepsister's beauty and poise, is friendly toward her. One evening during dinner with Rebekka and their three daughters, Otto suddenly dies.

Royal heralds announce that all noble young virgins are invited to a ball, where Prince Julian will choose a wife. To save them from poverty, Rebekka plans to marry off Elvira, her eldest daughter, to Julian. While Elvira dreams of marrying the prince, Rebekka considers her too ugly to succeed. To improve Elvira's chances with the prince, Rebekka subjects her to a series of primitive and painful cosmetic surgeries.

Elvira and Agnes are both enrolled in Sophie von Kronenberg's finishing school for girls. During dance classes, Agnes is allowed to stand at the front of the room with the pretty girls, whereas Elvira is relegated to the back with the uglier girls. This pressure causes Elvira's initial admiration for her stepsister to turn to resentment. Sophie later gives Elvira a tapeworm egg for weight loss. At home, Agnes reprimands her stepmother for spending their remaining money on Elvira's beauty treatments instead of paying to bury her father, whose rotting corpse is being stored in a disused room of the house.

When Elvira encounters Prince Julian in the woods, he mocks her appearance and is revealed to be a shallow womanizer, but Elvira continues to be smitten with him. One night, Elvira discovers Agnes having sex with Isak, a stable boy, and tells Rebekka. Disgusted, Rebekka throws Isak out and makes Agnes a servant, with the family calling her Cinderella. As the royal ball approaches, Elvira becomes malnourished and her hair starts falling out due to the tapeworm. Meanwhile, Alma has her first period, but does not tell her mother for fear she will be subjected to the same horrors as Elvira. Rebekka also has Agnes pulled from finishing school. Due to her improved appearance, Elvira takes over the starring role for the dance the school will perform at the ball.

During a dress fitting, the dress merchant provides Elvira with an elegant ball gown and a blonde wig to hide her hair loss. Elvira later sees Agnes with a ball gown that belonged to Agnes's late mother and angrily destroys it. Sleeping next to her father's corpse, Agnes awakens to a vision of her birth mother, who gives her a beautiful pair of shoes and warns her that the carriage will turn back into a pumpkin by midnight. Agnes's gown is mended by silkworms from her father's body.

At the ball, Elvira attracts Prince Julian's interest, but he quickly shifts his attention to a veiled Agnes, who arrives late. Elvira retreats to another room and vomits up tapeworm eggs. Rebekka forces her to dance with other men, whereupon Elvira sees Agnes without the veil. Agnes flees as the clock strikes midnight, leaving one shoe behind. Prince Julian declares he will marry the woman whose foot fits the shoe. Back home, aware that Agnes left behind a slipper, Elvira attacks Agnes with a butcher knife and demands the other shoe. Since her feet are too large, Elvira attempts to sever her toes using the knife. Rebekka coldly remarks that Elvira attempted to mutilate the wrong foot. Alma is horrified when Rebekka sedates Elvira and mutilates the "correct" foot.

The next morning, Elvira hears trumpets announcing the prince's arrival. She crawls on the floor, unable to walk, then falls down a flight of stairs, breaking her nose and chipping her teeth, only to find that the prince and Agnes have already found each other. Alma convinces Elvira to take an antidote to expel the tapeworm, which has grown to an enormous size. The sisters steal their mother's jewelry and leave so they can live free from her tyranny, while Rebekka fellates a young nobleman from the ball; she notices her daughters leaving but does not stop them. A pair of ravens eat the tapeworm's remains as the sisters ride away. Otto's rotting corpse remains forgotten in the house.

Writer and director Emilie Blichfeldt began developing The Ugly Stepsister while working on her thesis project at Norwegian Film School.^[16][17] Initially following a woman with a "talking vulva that tells her she's lonely", Blichfeldt took influence from "Aschenputtel", the Brothers Grimm's version of the Cinderella story, and reimagined the character to be one of Cinderella's stepsisters cutting off her toes to fit in the glass slipper.^[18][16] She was unfamiliar with the body horror genre until she watched David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash in 2015, which led her to "a deep dive into anything Cronenberg" and discovering the filmographies of Italian film directors Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.^[1][18] Their films, along with Julia Ducournau's Raw (2016), led her to utilize body horror for the film.^[18][16] The script was informed by Blichfeldt's "own struggles with body image", which she intended to "provoke both empathy and discomfort and inspire [the film's] audience to reflect upon their perceptions of, and relationship to, beauty."^[19]

When she was growing up, Blichfeldt regularly watched the Norwegian dub of the "camp" film Three Wishes for Cinderella, which she credited as an influence "to create a timeless, once-upon-a-time feeling" for The Ugly Stepsister's visual style.^[20] Walerian Borowczyk, a Polish director known for producing pornographic films, was a "surprising" influence for Blichfeldt, who resonated with the way he filmed "natural, beautiful bod[ies]" and the "cheeky, sexy grotesqueness" of his work.^[16]

The film was produced by Maria Ekerhovd of Mer Film, in co-production with Lizette Jonjic, Zentropa Sweden, Mariusz Włodarski, Lava Films and Theis Nørgaard, Motor, with the support from the Norwegian Film Institute, the Polish Production Incentive and the Polish Film Institute, the Swedish Film Institute, the Danish Film Institute, Eurimages, DR, the Nordic Council Film Prize, and the Western Norwegian Film Center. It is distributed by Scanbox Entertainment, whereas international sales rights are with Memento International.^[21][22]

The crew of the film consisted of costume designer Manon Rasmussen, cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, editor Border Olivia Neergaard-Holm, visual effects supervisor Peter Hjort, and visual effects make-up artist Thomas Foldberg.^[19]

The Ugly Stepsister premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 2025 in the Midnight Section,^[10] and screened in the Panorama section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on 16 February 2025.^[23][24][25] It won the Director's Choice for Best Feature at the Boston Underground Film Festival in March 2025.^[26] It was also showcased at the 53rd Norwegian International Film Festival as Amanda Award nominee on 16 August 2025.^[27]

On 10 October 2025, it competed at the 58th Sitges Film Festival in the 'Oficial Fantàstic Competició' section, vying for the various awards given in the section.^[28][29]

Shudder, an American over-the-top subscription video-on-demand service, acquired the distribution rights for North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in December 2024.^[19] The film has also been sold by Memento to ESC FIlms Capelight, Beta Film, Lev Cinema, ADS, Cay Films, Cine Canibal, New Select, House of M, PT Falcon, Estin Film, and Vendetta Filmes.^[17]

The film was released in Norwegian cinemas on 7 March 2025 by Scanbox.^[12]

The film was released in US cinemas on 18 April 2025 by IFC Films.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 127 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Taking a hammer and chisel to a quintessential fairy tale, The Ugly Stepsister's masterful application of gore and subversion are the stuff that nightmares are made of."^[30] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[31]

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 3/5 stars, calling it "a movie hyper-aware of the sexual and patriarchal imagery of Cinderella, a film in the post-feminist tradition of Angela Carter and, unlike Michael Pataki's lowbrow 1977 porn-musical version, it avoids the obvious sexual symbolism of the foot in the slipper. Blichfeldt has made an elegant debut."^[32] The Times's Kevin Maher also gave it 3/5 stars, writing, "That's impressive — 30 years of film criticism and this is the first time that I've had to turn away from the screen for fear of retching. It's not an especially gross scene with, say, bodies blown asunder (see last week's Warfare). It is instead a deeply unnerving moment from this Cinderella redux by the Norwegian film-maker Emilie Blichfeldt, making her provocative debut."^[33] Peter Debruge of Variety wrote, "Contrasting how her female characters feel with the expectations men put on them, Blichfeldt makes clear that impossible beauty standards are the unfairest of them all, whether in the real world or this twisted fictional kingdom."^[34]

• The Ugly Stepsister at IMDb 
• The Ugly Stepsister at Berlinale
• The Ugly Stepsister at Filmweb
• The Ugly Stepsister at Rotten Tomatoes