The Ugly Stepsister: A Horror-Comedy That Misses the Mark
The Ugly Stepsister, a horror-comedy that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, reimagines Cinderella as a cautionary tale about the misery women endure to be attractive in the hopes of catching men’s eyes. The film assumes an alternate POV and piles on the gore, but ultimately says little about vanity and misogyny.
The story follows Elvira, a young woman who is desperate to marry local Prince Julian and live a life of wealth and romance. To achieve her goal, she undergoes a series of gruesome and painful cosmetic procedures, including ingesting a tapeworm to combat her weight and breaking her nose with a hammer and pick to correct her profile.
The film’s visuals are lavish and decaying, with a wispy haziness that complements the action’s sense of lavish decay. However, the humor is lacking, and the story follows a predictable narrative template. The tweaks to the Cinderella formula include Cinderella’s mother serving as her fairy godmother and her blue dress being repaired by maggots instead of silkworms.
The film’s critique of the beauty industrial complex is well-intentioned, but ultimately shallow. Elvira’s transformation is meant to slam the beauty industrial complex, but the film doesn’t grapple with the fact that women of this era and culture had scant opportunities for self-sufficiency and options other than to court marriage.
The film’s arguments about sexist standards are apparent from the start and simply reiterated in ever-nastier forms, leading to a depressing lack of surprise. The film’s themes are brought to memorable life in its revolting final set pieces, but ultimately, it fails to fully reckon with the core rot of Cinderella and its ilk. The Ugly Stepsister is a modern riff that’s content to stay on the surface, never fully confronting the gender and beauty-related assumptions and conclusions of its source material.
