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| Lea Myren as Elvira in "The Ugly Stepsister" [Images may be subject to copyright] |
“Cut the toe off; when you are queen, you will no longer need to go on foot.”
The line appears in the Grimm Brothers' version of Cinderella as a twisted sort of practical advice. A mutilated foot is a small price to pay for a crown. Modern retellings have largely discarded such brutality, transforming Cinderella into a comforting story about kindness rewarded and dreams fulfilled. Yet Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister suggests that the violence was never truly removed from the fairy tale. It was merely hidden beneath prettier images.
Much has been written about the film as a body horror story. The surgeries, bodily mutilations, parasites, and acts of self-destruction certainly place it within that tradition. Yet what makes The Ugly Stepsister so unsettling is not the violence inflicted upon the body. It is the realization that the violence originates in a story.
Blichfeldt's film understands something that many contemporary fairy-tale revisions overlook. Cinderella is not simply a narrative about romance or social mobility. It is a story about value. More specifically, it is a story that teaches audiences how value becomes visible. Beauty, in most versions of Cinderella, is never presented as a superficial attribute. It functions as evidence of virtue itself.
The logic extends far beyond Cinderella. Fairy tales have historically relied upon visual shorthand to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. Heroes and heroines are beautiful. Villains are excessive, grotesque, or physically marked by their moral failures. Beauty becomes a form of narrative legitimacy. To look right is to deserve happiness.
These stories are often dismissed as harmless fantasies, but their cultural influence lies precisely in their simplicity. Fairy tales reduce complicated social realities into recognizable patterns. They teach children how to interpret the world long before they possess the vocabulary to question it. Certain faces become associated with goodness, certain bodies with desirability, and certain forms of femininity with success.
Viewed through this lens, Elvira is not an exception to the fairy tale. She is its most faithful student. Unlike traditional versions of Cinderella, The Ugly Stepsister does not position its protagonist as a villain standing in opposition to virtue. Elvira genuinely believes in the promises the fairy tale offers. She wants love, admiration, belonging, and security. Her tragedy emerges from accepting the story's assumptions too literally. If beauty leads to happiness, then beauty becomes a necessity. If beauty determines worth, then the body becomes a problem to solve.
The film's body horror derives from this transformation of an abstract ideal into a physical obligation. Fairy tales often portray metamorphosis as magical. Pumpkins become carriages. Servants become princesses. Blichfeldt removes the magic, leaving only the demand. If transformation must occur, what does it actually require? The answer is pain.
Each surgical procedure Elvira undergoes reveals the violence hidden beneath the promise of self-improvement. The infamous nose operation is not horrifying merely because it is graphic. It is horrifying because it exposes beauty as labor. The same principle governs the ballet lessons, the eyelash stitching, and the parasitic creature she willingly consumes. None of these acts creates a new identity. They merely bring her closer to an externally imposed ideal.
The parasite is perhaps the film's most effective symbol because it transforms metaphor into biology. Beauty culture is frequently described as something women internalize. Blichfeldt literalizes the process. Elvira swallows an ideal that gradually consumes her from within. What begins as aspiration becomes infestation.
Yet focusing solely on Elvira risks overlooking the film's more radical insight. The Ugly Stepsister is not ultimately about an unattractive woman who wishes she were beautiful. It is about a society that leaves women with few alternatives. This is where Agnes (the film's Cinderella equivalent) becomes crucial.
In traditional versions of Cinderella, beauty and virtue reinforce one another. Agnes initially appears to occupy that familiar role. She possesses the effortless grace Elvira lacks and naturally attracts attention wherever she goes. Yet Blichfeldt refuses to treat beauty as liberation. Agnes understands that her appearance functions as a form of currency in a world structured by economic insecurity and patriarchal expectations. Her choices are shaped by the same system that destroys Elvira, even if she navigates it more successfully.
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| Elvira goes through the eyelash stitching procedure |
The contrast between the two women exposes the central deception underlying the fairy tale. One woman suffers because she lacks beauty. The other suffers because she possesses it. Their circumstances differ, but both remain trapped within a social order that measures female worth through appearance.
The film repeatedly reinforces this idea through imagery associated with decay. Maggots consume the dead father. Silkworms become linked to feminine perfection. Bodies are reshaped, altered, and consumed. Beauty is never presented as something natural or transcendent. It emerges from systems of extraction and transformation. Someone must always pay the cost.
Even Prince Julian, the object of desire around which the narrative revolves, is revealed to be remarkably insignificant. Traditional fairy tales treat the prince as a reward. Blichfeldt treats him as a symptom of the larger societal malaise. He represents the gaze through which value is assigned rather than a meaningful romantic possibility. Elvira's fixation ultimately has little to do with Julian himself. What she seeks is recognition. The prince merely happens to occupy the position of the person authorized to grant it.
This understanding reaches its culmination in the film's reimagining of the glass slipper. In most versions of Cinderella, the slipper functions as proof of destiny. There exists one perfect fit, and the narrative's task is simply to discover it. The Ugly Stepsister exposes the cruelty hidden within that logic. The slipper is not a symbol of belonging. It is a mechanism of exclusion.
The violence of the sequence does not arise from Elvira's decision to mutilate herself. The violence originates earlier, in the existence of the mold itself. The fairy tale assumes there is one correct shape, one ideal body, one legitimate form of femininity. Everyone else must either conform or be rejected. For perhaps the first time, Cinderella's famous slipper appears not romantic but ideological.
This is why the film's conclusion feels unexpectedly hopeful despite everything that precedes it. Elvira's liberation does not arrive through transformation, marriage, or social recognition. It arrives through rejection. She survives only when she abandons the fantasy that has governed her life.
Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once observed that stories possess the power both to dispossess and to restore dignity. The Ugly Stepsister is ultimately concerned with that dual possibility. Blichfeldt does not merely criticize beauty standards. She interrogates the narratives that make those standards appear natural.
For centuries, Cinderella has been presented as a story about virtue rewarded. The Ugly Stepsister asks a more uncomfortable question: what happens to those who internalize its lessons and discover they can never become its heroine? The answer is a body horror film. But more importantly, it is a reminder that stories shape the worlds people inhabit. If fairy tales can teach individuals to measure themselves against impossible ideals, they can also be rewritten to expose the damage those ideals create.
The true villain of The Ugly Stepsister is neither Elvira nor Agnes.
It is the story that taught them who they were supposed to be.
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