‘The Ugly Stepsister merits recognition in narrative for how unsparingly it revises the Cinderella story by restoring its original brutality. Blichfeldt draws on the Grimms’ version of the fairy tale, where mutilation, punishment, and bodily sacrifice are explicit, and reorients our sense of how that violence was later sanitized and resold as a fantasy of idealized feminity: the servant princess whose obedience is rewarded with beauty, safety, and love. By shifting the point of view from Cinderella to the ugly stepsister, the narration digs deeper, past the romanticization of a glow-up transformation; the film treats beauty as a system of labor, enforced through instruction, discipline, and pain. The body horror is precise and procedural, never indulgent, and its emotional restraint is devastating.’ Ottessa Moshfegh

‘THE UGLY STEPSISTER’

Selected by Ottessa Moshfegh

Type : Film

Production : Mer Film