This Grotesque, Beautiful New Horror Movie Is Perfect For Fans Of The Substance

Last year's surprise horror hit was "The Substance," Coralie Fargeat's brilliant, bloody body horror deconstruction of Hollywood's relationship with aging and beauty standards. The Oscar-winning film helped skyrocket Demi Moore into her first Academy Awards nomination over 40 years after first breaking into the industry, along the way showing mainstream moviegoers there's a hell of a lot of beauty to be found in cinema for real sickos. As poignant as it was popular, "The Substance" sharply subverted what it means to be "beautiful" and what self-love can look like (it's Monstro Elisasue, if you're curious), but it was also graphic, goopy, and gross enough that audiences were said to be vomiting during their screenings. Many feared that "The Substance" was a fluke, an indie horror Cinderella story of a film scorned by a major studio and picked up by a smaller, art-house distributor to become the belle of the ball. Fortunately, for those craving more stories like the aforementioned grotesquerie, she has arrived in the form of Emilie Blichfeldt's debut feature, "The Ugly Stepsister."

Inspired by the original "Cinderella" story by Charles Perrault and retaining the simmering darkness of the Brothers Grimm version (which saw one of the so-called ugly stepsisters chopping off her own toes in an attempt to fit her foot into the glass slipper famously left at a ball), "The Ugly Stepsister" is less of a revision of the classic story and more of a shift in perspective. Pop culture has elected to depict Cinderella's stepsisters as horrible people, but was that truly the case? Or were they, like Cinderella herself, battling a misogynistic world, choosing to fixate on their hearts' wishes (by dreaming of something better), and willing to do whatever it takes to find love and financial security for their family?

Twisted fairy tales are all the rage thanks to the public-domain boom of splatter flicks in recent years, but few can hold a candle to a voice as assertive and creative as Blichfeldt. With "The Ugly Stepsister," the filmmaker has crafted a movie as gorgeous as it is gruesome, complete with a few moments of gore that had a handful of people audibly fighting the urge to retch in the aisles at the 2025 Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Walt Disney Company has done an incredible job at tricking the general public into believing that its versions of fairy tales are the definitive interpretations, but anyone who has sought out the tales of The Brothers Grimm knows that the overwhelming majority of folk stories we hold so dear are, in fact, horror shows. "The Ugly Stepsister" lulls the audience into a false sense of familiarity with period-piece dress, large castles, and the poetic sounds of the Norwegian language. On the surface, the movie looks like it would fit right in at home with coming-of-age costume dramas like Sofia Coppola's "The Beguiled" or Greta Gerwig's "Little Women," but once the simmering horror shows its face, it snowballs into absolute mayhem.

Lea Myren stars as Elvira, the lovesick eldest daughter of Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), a woman who marries a widower (seemingly for his money) and becomes the stepmother of the beautiful Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). After Agnes' father dies and it's revealed that he's broke (it turns out he also married Rebekka for her presumed money), the widow — now responsible for three daughters — is thrown into a panic. The family doesn't even have enough money for a proper burial, so they're forced to leave Agnes' father's dead body to rot in a secluded room of the house. But things change when a proclamation is sent throughout the land that the Prince is throwing a ball for all of the eligible virgins to become his bride. The audience needs only to take one look at Agnes, a classically beautiful blonde, to know that this is her destiny ... but what of Elvira?

Elvira is not "ugly" by any stretch of the imagination (Myren looks nearly identical to Lindsay Lohan circa 2004 when she's in her ball gown finest), but everyone in her life points out that she does not look like her stepsister. Knowing that she's essentially competing with her for the Prince's heart, she and her mother start investing in beautification procedures. A nose job, some false eyelashes, weight loss, and a new dress should do the trick — but what does plastic surgery look like in a time before plastic?

Well, it looks like breaking someone's nose with a chisel before putting it in a metal cage to resize it. It also means physically sewing in eyelashes with cocaine as a numbing agent instead of gluing them on. As for weight loss ... well, let's just say disseminated cysticercosis is alive and well in "The Ugly Stepsister." The lengths Elvira is willing to go to improve her appearance and have a shot at marrying the prince seem extreme if not downright barbaric, but her methods are not that dissimilar from what young women continue to engage in today. The film is an earnest examination of the way society makes women believe they are inferior, convinces them to see their compatriots as competition, and to ignore their body's warning signs that something is wrong if it means achieving beauty.

Refreshingly, however, "The Ugly Stepsister" also rises above many of the other "the villain was actually not that bad" stories in recent memory (think "Cruella"). The film never demonizes Agnes for being Cinderella. She isn't secretly some terrible person who does not deserve happiness, just a woman caught in the same machine that is hellbent on destroying us all but can get out of it thanks to genetics, privilege, and access to magic. Some girls just have all the luck, and that's just as hard as a tapeworm egg to swallow.

"The Ugly Stepsister" is Blichfeldt's first feature, and it is unfathomable that a first-time feature filmmaker was given the space (and budget) to make such a biting, daring, and monstrous creative swing. The reason "Cinderella" is a fairy tale is because to be a woman so pure and beautiful that a rich prince takes you away from your terrible existence is a fantasy. The painful truth is that for the majority of us, we will never be Cinderella and have far more in common with "the ugly stepsister."

For as utterly disgusting as the scenes of gore are (I cannot stress enough how Cronenbergian this movie gets), "The Ugly Stepsister" is truly special because it's a deeply relatable glimpse at the way so many of us engage in unhealthy practices in the name of "beauty." At the time of this film's release, one of the most popular trends on TikTok is the "morning shed," i.e. videos where women in their early 20s (or even teenagers) remove mouth tape, chin straps, face masks, and under-eye patches they wore to bed, all in the name of staving off the natural progress of aging. After a while, looking at Elvira with her metal cage to reshape her nose stops looking like an archaic beauty procedure in a period piece and starts feeling like a funhouse mirror of the viewer watching the screen.

Blichfeldt spoke to the audience at the Overlook Film Festival with a resounding love for Elvira and women like her because, as she explained, "I am her." Elvira and her mother bet it all on the belief that indulging in drastic measures to twist and contort her body and face into something more desirable to "the standards" is the key to love, happiness, and comfort. It's a bitter reminder that, for as oppressively atrocious as beauty standards are today, this isn't anything new.

IFC will release "The Ugly Stepsister" in theaters on April 18, 2025. It will head to Shudder soon after that.