Fairy tales were never meant to be gentle. Long before Disney sanitized them into pastel-colored packages, these European imports were often brutal survival stories soaked in blood, desperation, and costly lessons. Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt understands this, and with The Ugly Stepsister, she doesn’t just nod to these origins but tears the glittery veneer off of one of the most famous of them all, Cinderella, dragging us into a world of body horror and vicious beauty standards.

Set in a grim, vaguely medieval kingdom where appearances serve as both currency and weapon, we meet Elvira (Lea Myren), a young woman still growing into her beauty whose mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) has clawed her way into a new marriage seeking financial security only to have her elderly (and, unbeknownst to her, penniless) husband drop dead on their wedding night. With financial ruin on the horizon, Rebekka shifts her matrimonial ambitions onto Elvira, specifically targeting the kingdom’s prized bachelor, Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). The snag? Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), Elvira’s ethereal new stepsister, whose beauty threatens to steal the prince’s attention.

This sets the stage for a descent into stomach-churning horror as Elvira is subjected to primitive “beauty treatments,” including a tapeworm diet and makeshift bone-cracking surgeries that wouldn’t be out of place in a medieval torture chamber. Blichfeldt doesn’t pull punches: the story tilts hard into grotesque territory, and she twists the bones of Cinderella into something both disturbing and eerily familiar. However, Elvira is no meek heroine; she’s desperate, jealous, and gradually more willing to maim herself for a shot at accession. Myren is extraordinary, capturing Elvira’s slow spiral from insecure outsider to bloodied competitor, never letting us forget how heartbreakingly human her monstrosity is.

For her part, Agnes isn’t the flawless icon you’d expect from a would-be fairy tale princess. Loch Næss gives her a brittle edge; this Cinderella has secrets, sins, and painful scars of her own, with more complexity than saccharine goodness. Meanwhile, Torp’s Rebekka offers a fresh perspective on the wicked stepmother archetype: her cruelty stems not from jealousy but from desperate pragmatism, a woman navigating limited options in a world where beauty functions as survival. Her callousness is systemic to the situation; it’s not personal.

On the technical side, the film is often stunning in a raw, dangerous way. Marcel Zyskind’s (Daliland) cinematography turns crumbling Polish castles into enchanting and menacing spaces, creating a historically haunted yet dreamlike world. Manon Rasmussen’s costumes suffocate the characters in heavy fabrics and tighter-than-skin corsets, literalizing the constraints placed on women’s bodies. The dissonant score from John Erik Kaada and Vilde Tuv hums and shrieks beneath every scene, winding the tension tighter and tighter around our eardrums.

And the exceptional practical makeup effects from Thomas Foldberg and Anne Cathrine Sauerberg deserve both grateful applause and a warning label: it’s that disturbingly good and rivals anything from the David Cronenberg catalog. And it’s not gore for gore’s sake. The violence has a purpose, relating the barbarism of the past to today’s overly filtered, airbrushed beauty culture.