Funereal Plots

Horror Cinema reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

The Ugly Stepsister

Writer/ Director: Emilie Blichfeldt

In this blood-soaked and grotesque retelling of Cinderella, Elvira (Lea Myren) longs for Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth), a handsome but vacuous poet. She and her sister Alma’s mother Rebekka is set to marry Otto, a widower with a daughter named Agnes. This, Rebekka, thinks, will solve their money problems. But she’s in for a surprise when, after the wedding, Otto dies suddenly and is found to be broke.

So, she surmises, she will endeavor to marry one of her daughters to Prince Julian. But Elvira is ugly (one must, as this point, bring to bear one’s ability to deny what one sees on film, to suspend one’s disbelief). So, in order to make her suitable to win the Prince’s affections, and compete against Agnes, who is conventionally beautiful, a cosmetic surgeon is brought in. He violently breaks her nose and fits it with an ungainly apparatus to hold it in place. Elvira is also made to eat a tapeworm egg in order to lose weight (again, here, we must suspend our disbelief). Worse than all that, she’s sent to finishing school.

One night Elvira sees Agnes consorting with a lowly stable boy and reports the incident to her mother. The stable boy is sent away and Agnes is relegated to a servant’s role and is addressed, cruelly, as “Cinderella.” Throughout the movie, we occasionally see Otto, who lies dead, still in the house, rotting away, ridden with maggots and, one imagines, reeking to high heaven. Meanwhile, the attempts to beautify Elvira begin to fail, as malnourishment causes her hair to fall out and, at the ball where she hopes to be matched to Julian, she flees and vomits up tapeworm eggs. And Julian sees the masked Agnes and is intrigued by her, but she too flees, leaving behind a shoe.

When she discovers that Julian will come seeking the wearer of the shoe, Elvira, with some difficulty, hacks off her toes to try to make the shoe fit. She then breaks her nose and finally expels from her body, with violent, goopy force, a hideous, seemingly endless glut of segmented tapeworms. Her disintegration is complete, and she and her sister Alma run for the hills as Agnes and the Prince connect.

The Ugly Stepsister is effectively both lushly lavish and grotesque, gorgeous to look at while at times necessary to look away from. At one point, when I paused it, I burst out laughing. For after all the violence, the frontal nudity of both sexes, the gore and grotesquerie, on the screen it warned viewers of 18+ to use caution while viewing, due only to “flashing lights.”