These are tough times out there for a feminist body horror saga in a nutshell Post “subject” Filmmaking world. Coralie Fargeat’s gory parable about the abyss of self-loathing at the center of women’s society—Stoked Quest for Beauty—raised the stakes in terms of the genre’s potential cultural reach. (Look at them Oscar nominationsfor one.)
But female genre directors have been responding to impossible, often body-shaming standards of beauty for decades. Enter Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt, who makes her haunting entrance into that movement with her playfully grotesque feature debut “The ugly ladder. ” One character is named Sophie von Kronenberg In this stylized Gothic retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ spin on Cinderella should offer enough portent for each film is on its way in all its nose-breaking, flesh-eating, tapeworm-infested glory.
“The Ful Stepsister” begins with the tragically forced union of two families when the stag-faced, ringlet Elvira (Lea Myren) arrives via carriage at a Victorian estate in Sweden. The foundations are a swirl of 18th-century Gothic details, recognizable to Grimm-heads who can already smell the inevitability of dire events locking into place, and hazy, dreamlike 70s arthouse vibes, thanks in part to the postmodern title cards and a soundtrack of harps and synthesizers. In other words, here’s a classic tale retooled into something perhaps more bracly modern – even if its storytelling techniques, female body horror aside, are largely traditional.
Elvira is the ugly duckling in her family, which includes money-hungry widowed mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) and Elvira’s fairer sister Ama (Flo Fagerli). They have lost their patriarch and desperately need money which they hope to secure in the home of the noble Lord Otto (Ralph Carlsson) and his ethereally beautiful daughter, Agnes (Thea-Sofie Loch Næss), now Elvira and AMA’s step sister. Agnes is the kind of long-haired beauty you imagine on horseback in paintings or cloudy dream sequences of cheesy, horny ’80s movies, but she has a raspy, restless edge that will define her more vividly as the film’s carriage ride to the depravity careens off the trail of primmers – the flavor of the installation.
A feminist body horror saga is often a study in beauty contrasts, and immediately Elvira and Agnes are set up as classic nemeses as Elvira covets her stepsister’s elegance. In slapstick fashion, Otto suddenly dies at the dinner table, leaving the three women alone as a newly fractured family unit; In even more tragicomic terms, Otto and Agnes are revealed to be dead. Which leaves the family no choice but to submit the daughters for battle at the nearby King’s Ball, where four full moons from now, the hot Prince Julian (Isaac Calmroth) will choose a lucky maiden to be his princess.
Some key gendered choices aside, Blichfeldt hews closely to the mold of the original Grimm Brothers story in ways that, however inevitably, cannot escape predictability as Elvira undergoes transformations for the big ball. But the filmmaker nails a well-worn tale with plenty of nasty body horror that injects refreshing vim and power. The ant, working under a makeup team that includes Anne Chatrine Sauerberg and prosthetics artist Thomas Foldberg, is dumped in dowdiness from frame one – A, by society’s standards, for bulbous nose broken and rejudged with a hammer and harrowing clinical removal of a quack Dr. Esthetique (Adam Lundgren).
Another scene bound to induce winces and hooded eyes involves a barbaric eyelash transplant procedure, cinematographer Marcel Zyskind’s camera bringing us all too close to the cuts and their aftermath. Then there’s the co-headmistress of a posh finishing school who entrusts Elvira with a tape mask that promises to bring her down a few sizes and flush out the hidden beauty within. None of this goes well, of course.
Blichfeldt credits body horror to Godfather David Cronenberg As an influence – how could she not? – Although “The Ful Stepsister” is more body horror in its formalism than spiritual in terms of the genre. The film lacks Cronenberg’s pathos and furious philosophical inquiry, more interested in the surface of things without penetrating them too deeply or leaving a gaping wound. Sequences of Elvira starving herself and obsessing over her weight wore the points down like a drill, although the script could do more to explore the lead’s subjectivity and how her self-effacing pursuit of beauty becomes contagious throughout her. Even as a tapeworm eats her from the inside out, and as Elvira eventually, of course, naturally facilitates the worst possible method of getting her feet to fit into the pesky slipper.
The secret-weapon character who makes the most haunting impression is Agnes, whose chignon hides a rebellious spirit beneath—as well as a furtive romance with the stable boy, Isak (Malte Gåringer). What’s going on in her head? Blichfeldt only gives us glimpses, but they are enough to cast a chilling spell. All body contortions, projectile tapeworm violence, and severed toes aside, the movie’s lamest sequence follows Elvira into the stable where she accidentally (?) spies Agnes, bent over, ass up, ready to receive Isak in the only way that what the as it is that the as it is that she is by mistake (?) Will not visit her chastity. The sounds of horses bucking and bucking only heighten the primal, animalistic vibes of a scene that shatters to Agnes being brutally admonished by her new stepmother and spurring Agnes’s own silent war against Elvira.
The slow cage set-up (despite punctuations of insane violence) leads everyone to the requisite madcap midpoint, where the quote-the-moment new-and-improved Elvira is revealed to her potential prince. Blichfeldt goes out of his way to discuss while skimping on the soul, even as “The Ful Stepsister” offers a way out for his (and all of its society’s) tortured women. The tyranny of an unreasonable hierarchy of beauty will forever be the inspired stuff of great horror. While the “ugly ladder” doesn’t go much deeper than Dr. Esthetique’s scalpel, the brave grotesque surface of the piece can only be deep enough.
Grade: B-
“The Ful Stepsister” premiered in 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Shudder will release the film later this year.
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