Did you ever read a Grimm fairy tale and think to yourself that it could probably use more ritualistic self humiliation and shocking body horror? Well, you actually probably didn’t, because the original stories by the Brothers Grimm went pretty hard with that sort of thing (no, seriously; check it out); however, emerging in the impressive wake of Coralie Fargeat’s Oscar Winning The Substance comes another example of wince inducing feminist body horror: The Ugly Stepsister.
Taking the familiar story of Cinderella and twisting it into a magnificently grotesque form, director Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt, joins the likes of Fargeat, Love Lies Bleeding’s Rose Glass and Raw’s Julia Ducournau to present yet another darkly numerous tale that shows the extremes that women put their body through in order to achieve the goals that have been laid out for them. Beware, there’s no pumpkin carriages, fairies, or friendly animals here – well, not unless you count an extremely needy tapeworm.
In an effort to better their own fortunes, two families are joined with the marriage of their surviving parents, but mere hours after the union, grave misfortune rears it’s head when the husband has a fatal heart attack and face plants right at the dinner table. Worse yet, due to a misunderstanding, it seems that both families laboured under the mistaken belief that the other had money, leaving the stern, status hungry Rebekka, her two daughters Elvira and Alma and her new stepdaughter, Agnes, dangerously broke.
So broke, she refuses to have her newlydead husband burried, a lifeline for Rebekka appears in the form of an open invitation to join a selection of women whom the Prince will judge and select to be his bride. Knowing that her eldest, Elvira, could never hope to match Agnes for natural looks or poise, Rebekka urges her child to embark on a series of brutal and expensive practices in order to make her more conventionally beautiful, thus increasing her chances of bagging the prize.
As Elvira is painfully naive in the ways of the world and has banked her entire future on falling in love with a man she’s never met, the young girl goes all in, first having her braces forcefully removed by a set of pliers that looks like it come right out of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, and then having her nose painfully broken and reset in order to correct a bump in the bridge. However, these vicious alterations still prove ineffectual as the gruelling selection process continues and poor Elvira undergoes even more shocking treatments to try and increase her chances, going as far as to enlist the aid of a tapeworm to help with her weight and having false eyelashes sewn onto her own eyelids.
But as her looks “improve” the sheer physical toll of all these acts of mutilation has been chipping away at Elvira’s sanity and self worth and when her future depends on whether she can fit in a discard shoe, she goes to even more desperate methods to secure her dreams.
While there’s no gushing geysers of blood and extreme close ups of Dennis Quaid eating shrimp, that’s not to say The Ugly Stepsister can’t hold its own when it comes to pulling out freakish visuals that both nauseate and amuse in equal measure. In fact, while it’s more buttoned down in execution by design thanks to its fairy tale trappings, Blichfeldt still holds nothing back while taking society to task over the lengths women are driven to obtain impossible beauty standards. When you look at what women are required to do these days to maintain that “perfect” look, be it anything from reconstructive surgery to out and out starvation, everything seem pretty barbaric, but once you transpose such treatments to the time of fairytales, things unsurprisingly get infinitely more brutal. But before we get into all of that, kudos have to be given to all involved for creating an experience that proves to be every bit as gripping as it is horrifying.
While it would have been easy for Blichfeldt to go super broad with her biting satire thanks to its source story, The Ugly Stepsister actually takes great pains to not short change its characters or its audience by delivering thin charactization – well, not for the female cast, anyway. While the males are portrayed as one dimensional cads or boob obsessed louts, each of the women featured here all are flawed, layered people that complicated the rather straightforward narrative we’ve been given for so long. Take Thea Sofie Loch Næss’ Agnes (aka. Cinderella) for example; hardly the impossibly virginal goody two shoes we’ve seen in the Disney version, she’s in a secret sexual relationship with a stable boy and is burning with class-based resentment at the “lesser” people who has wormed their way into her life – however, while certainly a more complex version of the character, that doesn’t mean she’s been shifted into “ironic bad guy” status. She does actually have a legitimate gripe thanks to her appropriately shitty stepmother refusing to spend money on a funeral and letting her father’s corpse molder away in the basement.
In turn, Ane Dahl Torp’s Rebekka feels horribly reminiscent of a nefarious Kris Jenner or the type of parent usually seen on the likes of Dance Moms who are happy to market their own children in an unscrupulous attempt at success.
However, the film truly belongs to the ungodly acts Lea Myren’s Elvira puts herself through as she goes from a fairly awkward girl with sweet dreams to a twisted wreck of a girl who ends up as scarred emotionally as she is physically. Both transformations are handled amazingly as Elvira starts her reconstructive journey armed with a set of braces that make her mouth look like a bar code, but once the desire to do anything takes root after bring planted by her mother, we focus on her huge scared eyes as various, inhuman acts are performed on her all in the name of beauty.
It’s here where the exagerated (or are they?) acts of “betterment” begin in earnest and if the sight of Elvira getting her nose snapped with a hammer and chisel is enough to freak you out, I’ve a strong feeling that you might not make it to the end credits. Blichfeldt seems to have borrowed wisely from the classic masters of Italian gore to visualise the worst that occurs, with the juxtaposition of needles and eyeballs for the lash sewing scene feeling highly reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Opera and elsewhere the showstopping regurgitation of a gargantuan tapeworm reminds me from the gut barfing scene from Lucio Fulci’s City Of The Living dead. However, it’s Elvira’s savage mutilation of her own feet and her mother’s subsequent reaction that will make you recoil the most and you’ll find that your reactions mirror that of Elvira’s younger, but far more level headed sister.
While it would admittedly make a superlative double bill with The Substance, The Ugly Stepsister manages to stand firmly on its own two feet (despite its alarming lack of toes) when it comes to furthering the cause of female body horror while gleefully ruining – or should that be reinstating – the classic fairy tale for us all. Ugly and beautiful in equal measure.
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