The Ugly Stepsister
The Ugly Stepsister
Starring Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Naess, Ane Dahl Torp, Flo Fagerli
Directed by Emilie Blichfeldt
Elvira (Lea Myren) is the older sister of widower Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), who just re-married thinking her new husband is rich, but after his sudden death not long after the wedding, finds from his daughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) that he was incredibly poor. Frustrated and wanting to maintain her wealthy status, she forces Elvira to undergo a series of painful surgeries to make herself more presentable to the young Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) before his big gala. Elvira undergoes the heavily evasive medical experiments and slowly becomes more attractive on the outside, but her own obsession over Julian makes her uglier on the inside, turning on Agnes and resorting to even more deeper levels of depravity to make herself perfect for her Prince Charming.
A Norwegian film, "The Ugly Stepsister" steps away from American censorship and goes full-Cronenberg in its delivery, turning Elvira from a withering flower to a blossoming one, before all the surgeries and other means she employs turns her into the ultimate ugly duckling. Anyone who's read the story knows about Cinderella's evil step-sisters, but this film takes a different spin on it: Both Elvira and her younger sister Alma are actually nice, polite, and kind - but their mother, Rebekka, is ruthless, diabolical, and will stop at nothing to achieve fortune. She's the one who forces Elvira to undergo the surgeries she endures (to full visual detail) to make her beautiful, and in doing so causes Elvira to suffer her own crisis of conscious as she at first saw herself as fine, but through negative enforcement found herself to be uglier than she is, forcing her to make some unspeakable choices to make herself more beautiful.
The film is definitely akin to the likes of "Black Swan" in that both movies center on a woman striving for perfection - there, Natalie Portman's Nina puts her body through the ringer to be the perfect Black Swan, and here Lea Myren's Elvira also puts her body through the ringer to be the perfect Princess. Myren is a revelation, playing the role with innocence that makes her endearing, captivating, and, most importantly, sympathetic. Seeing the evil stepsisters in the Disney version, you wouldn't have any sympathy for them, but Myren's innocent eyes convey the torturous soul inside that is trapped in a shell of outer beauty.
It's also a lot like "The Substance" in its body horror, to which director Emilie Blichfeldt doesn't shy away from. Elvira gets a nose job, which sounds painless now, but considering the time this takes place it's nothing but, and we see it happen without the camera pulling away. So too her surgery to get new eyelashes that will make the most ardent moviegoer squirm (yes, even I squirmed a bit, even though in my mind I was figuring out how they did it while showing us every...gory...detail). Then there's the tapeworm, which had another person in the audience gasping in terror and had my mouth on the floor with how well it was shot and how much we saw of it.
Forgetting the Disneyfied version of the Cinderella story, "The Ugly Stepsister" leans more to its original source while also giving a compelling performance by Lea Myren that makes her ugly stepsister someone you sympathize with as she endures tortures few can imagine.
The Score: A
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