The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

Not rated, but this would 100% be an R-rated movie given the chance.  It's straight body horror in the vein (no pun intended) of The Substance.  While it isn't straight gore or torture throughout, when it gets sadistic, it gets really really bad.  This movie is meant to make you cringe in one way or another.  There was a point where I was watching through my fingers, as if that made a difference.  There's also sex and nudity coupled with a lot of vulgar language.  Still, not rated.

DIRECTOR: Emilie Blitchfeld

I like jump scares.  I know.  A lot of people really, really hate jump scares.  But jump scares are a good time.  They make you laugh.  You are caught off-guard and the same trigger that makes funny things funny is what makes a jump scare effective.  You were expecting a left turn and you got a right.  You have that burst of adrenaline immediately followed by a healthy come-down reminding you that you are safe.  

There are no jump scares in The Ugly Stepsister.

Nope.  The other kind of scare in horror movies is the gross-out.  I don't care for the gross-out.  The gross-out is (as everything on this page is, of my opinion) the thing that turns horror folks densitized.  I'm not saying there aren't good gross-outs.  I'm a big fan of The Evil Dead movies (for the most part).  I really like when gross-outs get silly.  But we're not there.  The Ugly Stepsister is the kind of gross-out movie that bums me out.  Part of the reason is that I feel like, while the message of The Ugly Stepsister is an idea that should be repeated, we've seen this story incredibly recently in The Substance.  Listen, I didn't like The Substance either.  There have been a bunch of plastic surgery horror tropes lately.  It is almost in vogue.  And we're kind of losing the message through all of the gore we are sitting through.

Genre has always been a great way to talk about society's ills.  I'm a big fan of the original Friday the 13th.  Friday the 13th, no holds barred, established that there are morality rules to horror movies.  The reason that the camp counselors were all being hunted down was because they partook in sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.  It's what Randy talked about ad nauseum in the Scream films.  But the thing about the slasher films and their commentary on bad behavior is that it kind of made that behavior punk rock for its audience.  Of course people were going to partake in illicit substances while watching these films because it was almost giving the middle finger to the fates.  If Jason was going to get you, well, you were going to go down swinging.

The body horror trend of showing self-mutilation as a story to show how absurd these characters are is not that.  At least, I certainly hope that it is not that.  Between The Substance and The Ugly Stepsister, we have these protagonists who lose all sense of humanity in the process of trying to beautify themselves.  Now, I'm writing this as a CIS-gendered white male whose body issues, while present, are pretty mild.  But these movies should be attacking body image problems as they go on.  But the thing is, there is an element of sadism to these films that I don't really get from movies like Friday the 13th.  Don't get me wrong, there is an audience out there who watches Friday the 13th and just wants to see cruelty to teenagers.  In fact, there are a lot of people who watch for those reasons.  But when I watch a movie like The Ugly Stepsister, I can't help but get this sense that I want to see the protagonist go through absolute hell for nothing.  Like, the movie just keeps punching and punching and torturing its main character for behavior that is almost sympathetic.

I'm going to try and talk about how the movie strives to degrade the protagonist's morals as the story progresses, so remind me to do that.  But Elvira's initial desire to be pretty is incredibly sympathetic.  In a story of absolutely miserable human beings, Elvira has poor body image.  I would say that she has a great personality, but she is constantly overlooked by everyone around her.  Even Cinderella, who comes across more noble by the end of the film, is beyond cruel to her.  It does that old trope with retelling of fables.  Like with Maleficent, the only way to make a villainous character heroic is by turning a different heroic character into the villain.   There's a story happening with Cinderella / Agnes here that we get enough of to give us hints for motivation.  But the thing that's bugging me just enough is that I don't really get the beats for motive changes. Here's my generous take on who, I think, Cinderella is in this movie.

If I am to take the events of The Ugly Stepsister without adaptations of Cinderella to help me out, Agnes is a mean sister.  She just lost her father, but understood that her father and she were using Elvira's family to financially survive a crappy situation.  She's cruel to Elvira, not allowing her to use her brush when Elvria seems to be open to embracing Agnes as a sister.  She never really cared about loving the prince.  Instead, she has been sleeping with the stableboy, whom she adores.  When Elvira tattles on Agnes's secret rendezvous (which I'm not sure why she does, outside the budding feeling that Agnes is competition for the prince's affection), the family tacitly agrees to start calling Agnes "Cinderella" and begin months long torture of this girl.  At this point, Cinderella becomes the heroine of the story, even though we don't have much interaction with Elvira and Cinderella together.  Mother still views her as the victim of the story and gives her a maggot-seamed blue gown.  The two of them make eye contact at the ball and Elvira goes into a rage, trying to murder Cinderella for taking her man.  

But Agnes wasn't a good person when the story starts.  Yes, I do sympathize with the fact that she had just lost her father.  But the two of them were con artists.  Ultimately, Agnes makes Elvira an enemy by being so cruel to her when she tried to borrow her hairbrush.  She confesses to only wanting Elvira's money, and yet it is Agnes who ultimately wins her dreams.  But the tragedy that the movie doesn't really address is that she doesn't love the prince.  She loves the stableboy, who flees nude into the forest.  Why he's nude at that moment?  I don't know.  We also know that the prince is a monster, having sex / implied raping women as he comes across them.  His friends even comment that his genitals are diseased and rotting away, which is meant to stress how naive Elvira is.  But if Agnes runs off to her happily ever after, it seems like she will just be miserable with this inhumane jerk who may give her a sexually transmitted disease.  Again, these are the problems when you make everyone in your story terrible.

Also, the wicked stepmother is still a terrible person.  If this is a story from another perspective, explaining why Elvira is known as one of the ugly stepsisters, her personality doesn't make a ton of sense.  I will begrudge that her intense beauty regimen, which stresses barbarism, may be driving her insane.  But Rebekka is cruel to everyone from moment one.  In almost every other adaptation, it is assumed that the two stepsisters are cruel because they were raised to be cruel.  The part that doesn't make a ton of sense to me is that Rebekka is consistent.  From moment one in the story, we understand that she is always looking out for herself.  As much as Rebekka is enabling and even pushing Elvira, it is for her own benefit.  The prince offers financial security.  I'm never quite sure how much Rebekka understands that she had been had by Agnes's father.  It really reads that she's just a selfish character, especially in that moment when Alma catches Rebekka performing lewd acts on one of the prince's cronies.  Why would Elvira be so innocent and then go so evil given Agnes's small cruelties when she is raised in a cruel household?  Again, we could always write it up to the beauty regimen, but it reads a little bit false.

I guess the thing that is bugging me is that this movie feels even tonally like a copycat of The Substance.  Would this movie even exist without The Substance.  For all I know, this was in production before anyone even had a chance to view The Substance.  Still, there's an overall vibe of copying.  It's really well done, even if it isn't my cup of tea.  I'm just not a fan of this nor am I a fan of The Substance.  Put them together, and I'm just bummed out.