THE UGLY SISTER. Beauty Is Pain [REVIEW]

We all know the fairy tale of Cinderella – the poor orphan forced to live with her wicked stepmother and her ugly stepsisters, who, thanks to magic and fate’s justice, ends up marrying a prince. Some of us probably also remember that in the uncensored version by the Brothers Grimm, the story is more brutal – for example, in the gruesome lengths Cinderella’s stepsisters go to in order to fit their feet into the glass slipper. Norwegian debut director Emilie Blichfeldt certainly remembers, and inspired by the bloody Grimm version, she decided to retell the classic story – this time from the perspective of the less attractive, adopted sister of the fairy tale heroine.

The Ugly Sister begins with the first meeting of the girls – not yet rivals. Widowed Rebekka arrives with her daughters Elvira and Alma from Norway to Sweden, where she marries Otto, an aging landowner living alone with his beautiful daughter Agnes. The marriage of convenience is meant to improve both families’ financial standing, but things quickly spiral when Otto dies on the wedding night. After his death, it’s revealed that both parties hoped to gain more from the union than they were willing to give. As a result, Rebekka ends up living with her two biological and one stepdaughter in Otto’s estate, struggling to make ends meet and cutting costs wherever possible – even on her late husband’s funeral.

The chance to escape poverty lies in the upcoming royal ball, during which Prince Julian – a poetic soul and the object of naive Elvira’s infatuation – will choose a bride. Both Elvira and Agnes are invited and hope to win the prince’s heart, though one of them clearly has the visual advantage. Blichfeldt reconstructs the familiar narrative with some interesting, though not entirely surprising, shifts. In The Ugly Sister, Agnes/Cinderella is more of a mean-spirited, arrogant noblewoman who looks down on her less fortunate stepsisters (the director cleverly plays on historical Norwegian-Swedish tensions here), while the older stepsister, Elvira, is not a spiteful villain but a dreamy, insecure “ugly duckling,” her self-doubt stoked by her mother.

The story of the sisters’ rivalry over the prince hinges on the contrast between the statuesque beauty of Agnes and Elvira, who must pay for beauty with pain in the office of an aesthetic doctor. The central theme of The Ugly Sister becomes “beauty is pain,” and the film’s fairy-tale costume drama is disrupted by a grotesque realism, exposing the dirt, brutality, and suffering embedded in women’s lives. Elvira’s trajectory, in her obsessive pursuit of idealized beauty to win the prince’s favor, provides Blichfeldt with the material for a genre-bending hybrid: a costume drama fused with gory body horror. The procedures Elvira undergoes to reach her dream are brutally depicted, enough to make even seasoned genre fans wince.

The world built around male desire is portrayed with a grimy realism and vulgarity that brings a gritty grounding to the fairy tale core. Blichfeldt is clearly inspired by Julia Ducournau and glances toward David Cronenberg (whose name, fittingly, is used for a Polish ballet teacher), as well as the bodily desire–driven cinema of Walerian Borowczyk. These influences are flavored with a texture reminiscent of giallo cinema – Dario Argento and his successors like Peter Strickland and Bertrand Mandico. The result is a fascinating aesthetic collage of fairy tale and realism, where familiar and sanitized tropes find their darker and more complex reflections.

At the heart of The Ugly Sister is young Lea Myren in the title role, convincingly portraying a kind but lost girl, increasingly detached from reality under the pressure of societal expectations and ideals. Her fragility contrasts with the unwavering poise of Agnes, played by Thea Sofie Loch Næss, and this tension drives the film thematically. Also notable is the excellent performance by Ane Dahl Torp as Rebekka, who proves to be not just ruthless and at times lacking empathy, but above all a mother in survival mode – a mindset she passes on to her daughter.

Despite the strong creation and acting of the three central female characters, the narrative’s near-total neglect of Alma is striking – her role is reduced to that of a rebellious tomboy teenager with little real impact on the story. One also can’t help but feel that the film’s overall feminist take on the fairy tale reiterates rather well-worn conclusions and doesn’t offer particularly original insights for the discourse. This lack of full development in some plotlines or characters points to a larger issue with The Ugly Sister – a certain degree of compromise. Blichfeldt doesn’t fully commit to abandoning fairy tale conventions in favor of a grotesque reinterpretation, lingering somewhere between a story of bodily sacrifice for beauty and female experience under male lust, and an idealistic tale of fairies and enchanted dresses.

It feels somewhat like international producers toned down the claws of the debut director, not allowing her to fully realize her more brutal vision. Still, Emilie Blichfeldt succeeds in asserting a bold, authorial voice through an intriguing revision of a timeless classic.