The Ugly Stepsister

The Ugly Stepsister
Theatrical release poster
Norwegian	Den Stygge Stesøsteren
Directed by	Emilie Blichfeldt
Screenplay by	Emilie Blichfeldt
Based on	"Aschenputtel" by the Brothers Grimm[a]
Produced by	Maria Ekerhovd
Starring	Lea Myren Thea Sofie Loch Næss Ane Dahl Torp Flo Fagerli Isac Calmroth Malte Gårdinger
Cinematography	Marcel Zyskind
Edited by	Olivia Neergaard-Holm
Music by	Kaada Vilde Tuv
Production companies	Mer Film Lava Films Motor Zentropa
Distributed by	Scanbox Entertainment
Release dates	23 January 2025 (2025-01-23) (Sundance) 7 March 2025 (2025-03-07) (Norway) 28 May 2025 (2025-05-28) (Denmark) 13 June 2025 (2025-06-13) (Sweden)
Running time	109 minutes
Countries	Norway Poland Sweden Denmark
Languages	Norwegian Polish Danish Swedish
Budget	$4.2 million[2]
Box office	$5.6 million[3]

The Ugly Stepsister (Norwegian: Den Stygge Stesøsteren) is a 2025 satirical^[4][5] black comedy^[6] body horror^[7][8] film written and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, in her directorial debut. It stars Lea Myren, Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Ane Dahl Torp and Flo Fagerli; using the motif of the fairy tale "Cinderella", it retells a twisted story of Elvira, who competes against her beautiful stepsister in a bloody battle for beauty.

The film had its world premiere as the opening film of the Midnight section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on 23 January.^[9][10] It was also screened at the Panorama section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on 16 February.^[11] It was theatrically released in Norway on 7 March by Scanbox Entertainment,^[12] in Denmark on 28 May,^[13] and in Sweden on 13 June.^[14]

It was nominated for the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Award at the 98th Academy Awards.^[15]

A widow, Rebekka, has two plain daughters named Elvira and Alma. She marries an older widower, Otto, who has a beautiful daughter named Agnes. Otto and Rebekka marry and blend their families, each in hopes of becoming wealthy via the other, only to find out neither family has any wealth to speak of. Agnes behaves haughtily toward her stepmother and stepsisters for their comparatively low social status. One evening during dinner with Rebekka and their three daughters, Otto suddenly dies.

Royal heralds announce that all noble young virgins are invited to a ball, where Prince Julian will choose a wife. To save them from poverty, Rebekka plans to marry off Elvira, her eldest daughter, to Julian. While Elvira dreams of marrying the prince, Rebekka considers her too ugly to succeed. To improve her chances with the prince, Rebekka subjects Elvira to a series of primitive and painful cosmetic surgeries. Elvira is also made to take finishing lessons with Agnes. During dance classes, Agnes is allowed to stand at the front of the room with the pretty girls, whereas Elvira is relegated to the back with the uglier girls. This pressure causes Elvira's initial admiration for her stepsister to turn to resentment. One of the finishing school teachers gives Elvira a tapeworm egg for weight loss. Agnes reprimands her stepmother for spending their remaining money on Elvira's beauty instead of paying to bury her father, whose rotting corpse is being stored in a disused room of the house.

When Elvira encounters Prince Julian by chance in the woods, he mocks her looks and is revealed to be a shallow womanizer, but Elvira clings to her belief that he is a good man. One night, Elvira discovers Agnes having sex with Isak, a stable boy, and tells Rebekka. Disgusted, Rebekka throws Isak out and makes Agnes a servant girl, and the family starts calling her Cinderella. As the royal ball approaches, Elvira becomes malnourished and her hair starts falling out in clumps due to the tapeworm. Meanwhile, Alma has her first period, but does not tell her mother for fear she will be subjected to the same horrors as Elvira. Rebekka also has Agnes pulled from finishing school, leaving no one in the starring role for the dance the school will perform at the ball. Due to her changed appearance after the weight loss and cosmetic surgeries, Elvira is given the role.

During a dress fitting with her mother, the dress merchant provides Elvira with a fancy ballgown and a blonde wig to hide her hair loss. He notices Agnes's beauty and makes inappropriate advances on her. Elvira later sees Agnes with a ball gown that belonged to Agnes's late mother and angrily destroys it. Agnes cries over her father's corpse. She then has a vision of her mother, who gives her a beautiful pair of shoes and warns her that the carriage will turn back into a pumpkin by midnight. Silkworms on her father's body fix Agnes's torn gown.

At the ball, Elvira attracts Prince Julian's interest, but his attention is quickly stolen by a veiled Agnes, who arrives late. Elvira flees to another room and vomits up tapeworm eggs. Rebekka forces her to go back to the ball and dance with other men, during which Elvira sees Agnes without the veil. Agnes hears the clock chiming midnight and runs away, leaving one shoe behind. Prince Julian declares he will marry the woman whose foot fits the shoe. Back home, aware that Agnes left behind a slipper, Elvira attacks Agnes with a butcher knife and forces her to hand over the other shoe. When she discovers that her feet are too large for the slippers, Elvira attempts to sever her toes using the same knife. She is found by Rebekka and Alma. Rebekka coldly notes that Elvira attempted to mutilate the wrong foot. Alma is horrified when Rebekka sedates Elvira and mutilates the "correct" foot.

The next morning, Elvira hears trumpets announcing the prince’s arrival. She crawls on the floor, unable to walk, then falls down a flight of stairs, breaking her nose and chipping her teeth, only to find that the prince and Agnes have already found each other. Defeated, Elvira listens to Alma, takes an antidote and vomits up an enormous tapeworm. The sisters steal their mother's jewelry and leave so they can live free from her influence, while Rebekka fellates a nobleman whose attention she stole from Elvira at the ball.

In a post-credits scene, Otto's rotting corpse remains forgotten in the same room.

Writer and director Emilie Blichfeldt began developing The Ugly Stepsister while working on her thesis project at Norwegian Film School.^[16][17] Initially following a woman with a "talking vulva that tells her she's lonely", Blichfeldt took influence from "Aschenputtel", the Brothers Grimm's version of the Cinderella story, and reimagined the character to be one of Cinderella's stepsisters cutting off her toes to fit in the glass slipper.^[18][16] She was unfamiliar with the body horror genre until she watched David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash in 2015, which led her to "a deep dive into anything Cronenberg" and discovering the filmographies of Italian film directors Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.^[1][18] Their films, along with Julia Ducournau's Raw (2016), led her to utilize body horror for the film.^[18][16] The script was informed by Blichfeldt's "own struggles with body image", which she intended to "provoke both empathy and discomfort and inspire [the film's] audience to reflect upon their perceptions of, and relationship to, beauty."^[19]

When she was growing up, Blichfeldt regularly watched the Norwegian dub of the "camp" film Three Wishes for Cinderella, which she credited as an influence "to create a timeless, once-upon-a-time feeling" for The Ugly Stepsister's visual style.^[20] Walerian Borowczyk, a Polish director known for producing pornographic films, was a "surprising" influence for Blichfeldt, who resonated with the way he filmed "natural, beautiful bod[ies]" and the "cheeky, sexy grotesqueness" of his work.^[16]

The film was produced by Maria Ekerhovd of Mer Film, in co-production with Lizette Jonjic, Zentropa Sweden, Mariusz Włodarski, Lava Films and Theis Nørgaard, Motor, with the support from the Norwegian Film Institute, the Polish Production Incentive and the Polish Film Institute, the Swedish Film Institute, the Danish Film Institute, Eurimages, DR, the Nordic Council Film Prize, and the Western Norwegian Film Center. It is distributed by Scanbox Entertainment, whereas international sales rights are with Memento International.^[21][22]

The crew of the film consisted of costume designer Manon Rasmussen, cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, editor Border Olivia Neergaard-Holm, visual effects supervisor Peter Hjort, and visual effects make-up artist Thomas Foldberg.^[19]

The Ugly Stepsister premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 23 January 2025 in the Midnight Section,^[10] and screened in the Panorama section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on 16 February 2025.^[23][24][25] It won the Director's Choice for Best Feature at the Boston Underground Film Festival in March 2025.^[26] It was also showcased at the 53rd Norwegian International Film Festival as Amanda Award nominee on 16 August 2025.^[27]

On 10 October 2025, it competed at the 58th Sitges Film Festival in the 'Oficial Fantàstic Competició' section, vying for the various awards given in the section.^[28][29]

Shudder, an American over-the-top subscription video-on-demand service, acquired the distribution rights for North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in December 2024.^[19] The film has also been sold by Memento to ESC FIlms Capelight, Beta Film, Lev Cinema, ADS, Cay Films, Cine Canibal, New Select, House of M, PT Falcon, Estin Film, and Vendetta Filmes.^[17]

The film was released in Norwegian cinemas on 7 March 2025 by Scanbox.^[12]

The film was released in US cinemas on 18 April 2025 by IFC Films.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 127 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Taking a hammer and chisel to a quintessential fairy tale, The Ugly Stepsister's masterful application of gore and subversion are the stuff that nightmares are made of."^[30] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[31]

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 3/5 stars, calling it "a movie hyper-aware of the sexual and patriarchal imagery of Cinderella, a film in the post-feminist tradition of Angela Carter and, unlike Michael Pataki's lowbrow 1977 porn-musical version, it avoids the obvious sexual symbolism of the foot in the slipper. Blichfeldt has made an elegant debut."^[32] The Times's Kevin Maher also gave it 3/5 stars, writing, "That's impressive — 30 years of film criticism and this is the first time that I've had to turn away from the screen for fear of retching. It's not an especially gross scene with, say, bodies blown asunder (see last week's Warfare). It is instead a deeply unnerving moment from this Cinderella redux by the Norwegian film-maker Emilie Blichfeldt, making her provocative debut."^[33] Peter Debruge of Variety wrote, "Contrasting how her female characters feel with the expectations men put on them, Blichfeldt makes clear that impossible beauty standards are the unfairest of them all, whether in the real world or this twisted fictional kingdom."^[34]

• The Ugly Stepsister at IMDb
• The Ugly Stepsister at Filmweb
• The Ugly Stepsister at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Ugly Stepsister at Berlinale