The Ugly Stepsister

“Ugly Stepsister” gets get very ugly but it’s a beautifully constructed nightmare bearing with a ‘70s moody Gothic look and a bizarro soundtrack.

Slyly funny and visually captivating, its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical.

Blichfeldt blends the more brutal folktale elements with phantasmatic longing to create a version of Cinderella where beauty is pain for some women, but life is pain for all of them.

A wonderfully extreme spin on the Cinderella story that doesn’t hold back showing the lengths the title character goes to to meet Cinderella standards. A top tier first feature for Emilie Blichfeldt and a staggeringly impressive debut for lead, Lea Myren.

Emilie Blichfeldt knows the exact point of queasiness to which she can push an audience and gradually tests how much further she can move that mark with each successive scene.

One of the best horror films of the decade so far.

The contrast between fairy tale aesthetic and grim body horror is compelling, but the film seems to revel in the grotesquerie and gore more often than it presents incisive commentary.

It effectively takes a scalpel to what constitutes “pretty” by penetrating the skin and cutting deep.

The Ugly Stepsister is rich and uncompromising in its feminist vision [...] the film rips the facade of shallow morality apart and digs deep into the void of stomach-churning terror.

The Ugly Stepsister is a clever re-imagining of a fairy tale that stays true to the source material's oft-forgotten grisliness.