The Ugly Stepsister

Bluesky

Everyone knows the story of Cinderella, the lonely girl bullied by her step-family who finds magical aid to transform her life by meeting a prince. It’s been told in cinema numerous times, with Disney animated and live action versions, a high school version, a bizarre Italian version set at sea, and even a horror version – but notably, it has always been told from the same point of view. It was, so she says, a dream that inspired Norwegian director Emilie Blichfeldt to do things differently, and after seeing this, you’ll wonder at the fact that nobody tried it before. What is there to say, really, about an innocent child’s journey from rags to riches? It’s just an exercise in wishful thinking. Her stepsisters are much more interesting characters.

Having two stepsisters at the centre of the story would complicate things, so Blichfeldt has the younger one, Alma (Flo Fagerli) be too young to play much of a role in the primary plot. The story focuses on 18-year-old Elvira (Lea Myren), whom we first meet as she reads a book titled Prince Julian’s Most Beautiful Poems in the back of a carriage. She will shortly arrive at the stately home whose owner, Otto (Ralph Carlsson) is to marry her mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp). As she races up the stairs, her eyes tell us that she’s never seen a place like this before, so it’s not a surprise when we find out that her widowed mother married for money. Unfortunately, so did Otto, under the impression that she was rich – beyond the house itself, the new family has very little. When Otto dies, Rebekka despairs of finding a wealthy man willing to marry a woman her age, so Elvira takes it upon herself to find a husband and thereby save the family from poverty. She aims for the very top, having already decided, on the basis of those poems, that she’s in love with Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth) himself.

Where is Cinderella in all this? Her real name is Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), and she has, of course, already lost her mother, so the death of her father is devastating. Her initially friendly welcome to Elvira gives way to bitterness, especially when she realises that the arrangement was never about love, and that his funeral will be put on hold so that Rebekka can invest the last of their money on improving Elvira’s chances of making a suitable match. This leads to rivalry between the two girls and, when Agnes’ best kept secret is discovered, to her maltreatment by an increasingly frantic Rebekka. There’s a good deal of depth and nuance to these relationships as Blichfeldt uses them to illustrate how a society which makes women dependent on men magnifies every petty disagreement and sets them at odds with one another. Nobody here really has a hope of finding their heart’s desire.

Much of what follows focuses on the education and physical ‘enhancements’ that Elvira goes through in an attempt to turn her from ‘ugly’ stepsister into a bewitching beauty. There’s real heroism in the effort she makes to become what her family needs, whether it’s by persisting with dance and deportment lessons despite being bullied by a teacher, or allowing a plastic surgeon to repeatedly break her nose without first administering anaesthetic. That heroism will, in the manner of many a Gothic tale, gradually give way to madness as she resorts to more desperate methods. Witnessing this, Alma is horrified. She becomes the only real locus of decency and sanity in an increasingly disturbing film.

As you might imagine, there’s a good deal of disturbing imagery here. Female viewers are likely to find it hardest, as the scenes in which Elvira learns to resent a body which has hitherto served her just fine will be close to home for many. Some viewers will find the scenes involving eyes too much to take; for others, Elvira’s final act of self-mutilation will be the one that breaks them. None of this is gratuitous, however, as it all contributes to Blichfeldt’s elegant yet furious take on the pressures facing women today. The same might be said for scenes in which we overhear what men have to say about Elvira and her peers. These are ugly in a different way, but the saddest thing is the way that Elvira tries to write them off in her own mind, or to see Julian as different.

Perhaps he is. We never really know what he means and what he’s saying just to please his peers, as he too is caught up in a toxic social situation. The film, however, keeps its male characters strictly on the sidelines. It is filled throughout with the trappings of conventional femininity: flowers, delicate little bottles, elaborate little statues, ribbons, cakes, soft fabrics, jewellery, mirrors, brushes. Lacking an aristocratic background (there is plenty of class critique here too), Elvira and Rebekka are not really very good at making those devices work for them, so Rebekka hires a series of experts to assist, whether she has to pay them with cash or, as it runs out, in other ways. Blichfeldt masters them with ease, and blends them seamlessly with images of decay. Elsewhere, she proves adept in the employment of different visual registers. There are echoes of Dead Ringers in some of the surgery scenes, and one might be reminded of the work of Ben Wheatley during a delirious dance scene set to Edvard Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King.

A hit at Sundance, this is a multi-layered film whose interest in extremes does not detract from the subtlety of the performances. Myren is riveting in the central role, while Næss delivers great support, her Cinderella far more complex and conflicted than any we have seen before. Both their characters can be unpleasant, but they’re also very human, and very young to be dealing with all this. The stepmother may be the least sympathetic of the main characters, but Torp still lets us glimpse, from time to time, the humanity beneath her steely façade, and she must face her own seemingly inescapable tragedy.

In an age when filmmakers are constantly reinventing fairy tales in search of deeper meaning, this is one of the most successful such ventures. Unlike most of those that have endured in the popular imagination, Cinderella was written as a light romance, but it has deeper folkloric roots, and Blichfeldt draws them to the surface.

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