Institute History
Description
In a fairy-tale kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira battles to compete with her incredibly beautiful stepsister, and she will go to any length to catch the prince’s eye.
A twisted retelling of Cinderella with gruesome fidelity to the Grimm-est rendition, The Ugly Stepsister shifts the focus to stepsister Elvira’s pursuit of beauty at all costs. But where fairy tale Cinderellas have silkworms, this one has tapeworms. For good measure, Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt throws in decomposing corpses, tongue-in-cheek body horror, and a 19th-century surgical makeover, creating a darkly funny, blithely grotesque debut feature. It shrewdly satirizes manufactured beauty and its industries, selling body image as the means to attain desirability, success, and social status. We can’t help but empathize with Elvira, who is insecure and drawn into her avaricious mother’s barbaric beautification scheme largely as a means to an end: acceptance and happiness (ever after). From nose to toe, the vessel of Elvira’s disturbing transformation is breakout talent Lea Myren, who gives a heroically committed performance.—John Nein
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This film contains mature content and may not be appropriate for all ages.