A Narrative on Purist Beauty in The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
The 2025 drama and pseudo-comedy that meets its fair share of body horror is unlike the usual censored version of Cinderella’s tale. We are used to seeing the blonde damsel in distress doing laborious tasks for her evil stepmother and less than appealing stepsisters. She attends the ball in a dress made from a shower of magical glitter from her fairy godmother. The prince seeks her out and they all live happily ever after. This is not the case for The Ugly Stepsister. Rather, this retelling is told from the narrative of Elvira, the stepsister to the beautiful and photogenic Cinderella, who is caught sleeping with the farmhand in the barn. And instead of a tale told of swishing dresses transformed from glitzy magic that floats out of a wand, the mystical is uncomfortably ordinary and this Norwegian take is anything but conventionally beautiful.
The viewer is introduced to Elvira whose appearance can be likened to that of a teenage girl undergoing the difficulties of puberty. She remains fixed on the fence between girlhood and maturation – her hair has been controlled into tight ringlets that bounce uncontrollably, while her metal-filled mouth undergoes a similar taming via braces, and dimples crease her cheeks with implied innocence. Already, Elvira’s appearance has been enduring societal expectations of beauty and forced conformity through bodily enhancements. Anyone who has had braces can attest that they may be referred to as societally-accepted torture devices. And just how far Elvira is willing to change her body only gets progressively more extreme as the movie progresses…
The title of the movie is a likely ode to the tale of the ugly duckling and his ostracization from his siblings. The little duckling looks differently to those around him and is thus treated differently. Unlike the duckling, Elvira’s transformation does not entail a story of self-love and discovery. While the ugly duckling’s journey results in his becoming a beautiful swan through his tests and trials, Elvira's pursuit of becoming beautiful and changing herself to fit the ideal renders her grotesque.
The first bodily transformation that occurs, after the announcement that the prince is to hold a ball in search of a wife, is organised by Elvira’s mother who arranges for an aesthetician to visit them. She justifies the expenditure of having Elvira’s nose changed to the beautification of her daughter securing their family the wealth of the palace through marriage…all while the body of her late husband, and the father to Cinderella, decays in the dining room. The mother has chosen to forgo an honorary burial for her ex-partner, in favour of making her eldest and marriageable daughter beautiful. The ugly duckling motif is further solidified by the beak-like device used to ensure that Elvira’s nose heals in the correct shape after undergoing a barbaric procedure involving brute force and breakage.
But it’s not enough. Cinderella continues to be favoured at the finishing school the girls attend – and she is the teacher’s choice for lead role in the dance that is to be performed in front of the prince. Elvira returns to the aesthetician, believing she needs more done to her appearance to increase her beauty, and overall, to compete with Cinderella. What follows is an uncomfortable scene of body horror, where the coked-up surgeon utilises a needle to insert fake eyelashes into Elvira’s eyelid waterline. The minute distance between the sharp needle to that of the eyeball is enough to make the hardiest of horror-lovers squirm. And the overseeing nurse with a milky eye, possibly damaged by a similar procedure, makes Elvira do a double-take and is arguably a foreshadowing that Elvira’s bodily enhancements will not get her what she wants.
Against her younger sister’s advice, Elvira consumes a tapeworm egg that makes a comfortable home in Elvira’s gut. She continues to gorge herself, even slurping spaghetti in the bath fed to her by Cinderella, while maintaining a slender figure – thanks to the ever-growing tapeworm. She has undergone cosmetic surgery, she has lost weight, and she’s made to be the centre of attention – quite literally as the lead dancer, since Cinderella supposedly cannot attend (according to the machinations in play by the stepmother).
The anticipated night arrives and Elvira wears a brand-new gown tailored to her. She feels like the belle of the ball, and if the night continues to go smoothly, her dream life with the prince may just come true. She’s done everything right, she embodies the ideal beauty standard, and she has performed flawlessly. The ‘beauty is pain’ mentality that Elvira has embraced is about to pay off.
And still, it is not enough. She is overlooked by the prince and left stranded on the dancefloor when Cinderella makes her mysterious entrance at the ball. While hiding behind a mask, Cinderella is still herself – the perfect orphan in need of saving…with a perfect body and standard of beauty, of course. Elvira, on the other hand, has taken matters into her own hands to fall into the trap of societal beauty, and has broken her body to meet her will. The woman who wears a fake wig (to hide the hair loss caused by the tapeworm’s devouring of nutrition), blinks eyelashes that drew blood upon insertion, and sports a nose that was broken into shape – she is a far cry from the girl introduced at the beginning of the movie and who was in awe of Cinderella upon their first meeting.
Upon returning home, Elvira is heartbroken and betrayed by the fantasy life she has built up with the prince. And it is here that the 2025 retelling pays homage to the Grimm’s version of the Cinderella tale. She is starving, she is angry, and she has Cinderella’s slipper. But the dainty shoe refuses to surrender to Elvira’s bigger foot. And so, with a meat cleaver in hand, the ugly duckling – I mean stepsister – positions the blade above her foot…and brings a log down onto the cleaver across her toes, partially severing them from her body. It is her mother who finishes the job – crippling her daughter physically and emotionally.
Her low point is made even worse, when she hobbles in pain down the stairs and trips, breaking her once-perfect nose and making it worse than before. The previous contender for the wife of the prince is now lacking toes and possesses butchered feet that end in haphazard stumps and bloody bandages, a scalp of thinning hair, and a broken nose that angles uncomfortably. Elvira has become the very thing she feared – unattractive and grotesque.
Her knight in shining armour turns out to be her younger sister, who whisks her away on horseback – far away from her mother who has only money and marriage in mind. Their ending remains unclear – but Elvira has butchered her body to the point of disability, and one cannot help but assume that in her pursuit of the beauty standard, she has damaged her body beyond repair. And it is here that the commentary lies: is the beauty standard set on a high pedestal of Western Eurocentric ideals really attainable? Or is it just that – an ideal not worth putting our bodies through at the risk of losing ourselves and maiming our bodies to the point of risking functionality.
