Review: 'The Ugly Stepsister" is a fractured fairy tale that shows the fear guiding Cinderella's antagonist toward disaster

Spare a thought for the plight of the fairy tale stepsister — who, as depicted in writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s subversively grotesque “The Ugly Stepsister,” is under a lot of pressure and hits the breaking point.

In this disturbing mix of medieval misogyny and body horror from Norway, we are introduced to Elvira (Lea Myren), a teen girl who has a crush on her kingdom’s prince, Julian (Isac Calmroth), whom she knows only from his published book of love poems. Elvira’s image of Julian is of a perfect boyfriend, tender and loving, ready to sweep up a fair maiden in his arms, even if she’s got braces on her teeth, as Elvira does.

Elvira’s mother, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), marries Otto (Ralph Carlsson), thinking he’s got enough money to solve the family’s financial problems. Elvira figures out Otto is broke, but unfortunately that’s just after Otto has keeled over dead at dinner. Rebekka reluctantly takes Otto’s beautiful daughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), under their roof, but soon the stepmother is treating Agnes like a servant — and given her an unflattering nickname: Cinderella.

Word spreads from the castle that Julian is inviting all young virgins to a ball, where he will choose among them to be his bride. Through the kingdom, the competition becomes fierce to find ways to impress Julian, which is why Rebekka has rushed Elvira to the Shrek-universe version of a plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren), to remove her braces and take a chisel to her slightly imperfect nose.

Elvira and Agnes are enrolled in a finishing school to learn the social graces, like dancing ballet — presented here as a way to display one’s femininity. Rebekka bribes the school’s headmistress, Miss Sophia (Cecelia Forss), to help Elvira get through, and it’s Sophia who gives Elvira a secret weapon to lose weight: A tapeworm egg.

Blichfeldt imagines the rivalry between Cinderella and her stepsister not as a head-to-head competition for the charming prince, as the common fairy tale narrative tells us. Here, the conflict is a forced competition of survival, set up by the scheming Rebekka and by a society that will only tolerate one kind of princess — blonde, thin, demure and unrealistically beautiful. Elvira is obsessed with landing Julian, but it’s an obsession build on fear of rejection of both the kingdom’s noblemen but also the rejection from her own mother.

The body horror elements build slowly, but do escalate fairly quickly. The gory effects don’t reach the bloody excess of, say, “The Substance,” but there are moments when the audience is likely to wince at something Elvira has done to maintain her beauty secrets. Those scenes punctuate the brutal unfairness that these characters, an ocean and a couple centuries away from us — but as real and as sympathetic as your neighbor.

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‘The Ugly Stepsister’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City), and soon streaming on Shudder. Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore, some sexuality and language. Running time: 110 minutes; in Norwegian, with subtitles.