phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2025

The Ugly Stepsister



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2025
Runtime: 1h 49m
Country: Norway, Denmark, Romania, Poland, Sweden
Language: Norwegian, Polish, Swedish
Genre Tags: Comedy, Drama, Horror
Plot Summary: Elvira battles against her gorgeous stepsister in a realm where beauty reigns supreme. She resorts to extreme measures to captivate the prince, amid a ruthless competition for physical perfection.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: Less focused on promoting positive body image (the ugly stepsister is not ugly), and more on showing how women are treated as property, and the only way to have any social and financial capitol is via men. The (evil) stepmother and stepsister buy into the system with literally everything they have, squeezing every resource, trampling over every other woman, and debasing themselves, all to get married to the douchebag prince. Yes, there is a Cinderella analog who starts off entitled and mean, but accepts her circumstances with grace and becomes a more empathetic character. Meanwhile, the younger stepsister steps aside from all this nonsense and looks on in horror and the ugly stepsister endures increasingly painful beauty treatments and hollows out her soul to win a prize she doesn't need. None of this is subtle, which is kind of the point. This is a straight up body horror slap to the face. This is a movie that features Chekhov's tapeworm.


Outside Reviews:

Sheila O'Malley
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

"The Ugly Stepsister" makes its points, and then makes them again and again, creating a sense of repetition without progression. It's not breaking news that our beauty-obsessed culture is damaging to young girls' self-esteem. "The Substance" is an obvious comparison, but "The Ugly Stepsister" is nastier, angrier, and grosser, if you can believe it. Blichfieldt's "burn it all down" approach creates turbulence and upset while walking over very well-trod ground.


Jacob Oller
Grade: B - Impressively nasty body horror puts The Ugly Stepsister through a beautification gauntlet

"Beauty is pain" becomes literally torturous. It's not that Elvira inherently detests her body, her face, her poise, her status. It's that the powers that be in her life—the political and economic patriarchy of nobility, and her mother's desire to play that game by its rules—are telling her to at every opportunity. Silently, so is Agnes, whose effortless blonde Disneyness doesn't require sewn eyelids or parasitic weight-loss. That the snobby stepsister is also sexually experienced, comfortable in her body, makes her a hateable foil as the curly-haired brunette heroine begins more fully embodying the insecurities of those around through visceral grotesquery. The film's female jealousy in service of mediocre men is as cutting as any of the bloody bits.