The Ugly Stepsister: Scandinavia's—Unofficial—Cinderella

//Anachronistic//: belonging to a period other than that being portrayed.

Just by looking at The Ugly Stepsister's beginning, I could define Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt's first movie, which I will try to analyze next, with this concept of what's foreign and weird in a determined time and space. But like in every good story, or at least like in every good remake of an already renowned story, the sense of anachronism doesn't end up being the most important part, but rather becomes part of a message and warning sign for future generations. We are before what would be the version of the story that Disney would never dare to present even as a draft script.

Within the first seconds of this twisted period drama with hints of character study, and while John Erik Kaada's synthesizers softly play—with an extremely similar style to Jean-Michel Jarre's—we witness in parallel the idealized fantasy of a young lady called Elvira, who's completely detached from reality. Let's say she's… in the middle of an alignment process. This feeling of extreme, constant mistrust in herself will take her down a bloody road in which the decomposition of flesh—her flesh—will create an analogy for human being's annihilation and self-destruction within the most toxic, repulsive environments of all.

Yes, a huge part of this overview seems to have been taken out of a summary that any ordinary person could have easily made last year about The Substance, the body horror mega hit that swept away all stereotypes, morally annihilated a part of Hollywood's ideal along a French director and, in addition, established a new canon. But no. Now, in this 2025, decomposition and rotten flesh come from Scandinavian lands, known for their wild, animalistic folklore. In this case, the narrative ambivalence can be more confusing than Fargeat's bestial satire: it's hard to distinguish reality's extreme horror and, even though Blichfeldt organically employs a wide array of stylistic resources to make the narrative move forward with dynamism and freshness, the experience ends up feeling kind of incomplete.

Where does the conflict lie and why does Elvira voluntarily undergo a forced transformation? While the mise-en-scène—clearly channeling Yorgos Lanthimos' signature style—makes it clear we are before an anomaly of the period subgenre, the excuse of narrating it in such an "anachronistic" way is justified with the mere fact that the director intends to distort those Disney's tales we used to play on VHS tapes to show a reality present to this day: fairytales were never and will never be real. Before this convincing determinism the Norwegian director offers, two pretty interesting ruptures are formed in her story. On the one hand and as the most evident element of all, we have the absolute deformation of the archetype of the stories "based on or inspired by," something that has been put to the test from unmemorable times—even though the opposite is believed sometimes.

But is there only one version of Cinderella? If we think in populist terms, every one of us remembers the image of Cinderella, the pumpkin, the fairy godmother, the perfectly fitting shoe… The stories told and how they are told end up degrading the background depending on who it benefits. Disney did it a couple decades ago with The Lion King—freely inspired by Amleth's legendary figure, the protagonist of Robert Eggers' great, underestimated The Northman—and, even long before, 44 years to be exact, gradually started this path of idealistic reimaginations with Cinderella's premiere. Who is going to tell us? Maybe this is what should have always been canon, and not the other way around.

The long-awaited ticket to social rise, the desperate desire for wanting to "be more" and the fake idea of the standardized beauty model take us by the hand while we spy Elvira grotesquely rubbing salt into the wound, delving into an apparently endless circle. Her hope of being someone, like she imagines herself after reading typical poems of the time, traces a similar path to that of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, an unforgettable character brought to life by an extremely young Ben Whishaw in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Obsession consumes each one of these characters with an unbearable, sickening sense of psychopathy with which, ironically, it's easy to get lost to before such twisted charm.

Elvira is nothing more than a faithful reflection of an era, but also the mirror of the present. A time in which many women, instead of wearing a corset and letting a hammer break their noses, fill their faces with Botox and filters on social media as if it were normal. A time in which many men, instead of "buying" young virgins with their social status, buy OnlyFans subscriptions. The mechanisms and methods may differ, but the result is the same. Have things changed or has our perception changed?

Published on JUNE 9, 2025, 21:43 PM | UTC-GMT -3

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