In the Flesh: The Ugly Stepsister

Another year, another movie about the torturous cultural anxiety over fatness in which the only even remotely fat presence onscreen is a faceless body double. Like last year’s far superior The Substance, Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister has fatness on the brain but stops short of actually depicting it. Protagonist Elvira (Lea Myren) swallows a fantastical version of a tapeworm to slim down for Prince Julian’s (Isac Calmroth) ball without sacrificing her beloved treats, and while the scene in which she vomits up the grotesquely overgrown parasite is well and truly nasty, even in purely visual terms, the whole thing feels incomplete. If the film is so concerned with the body, with fatness, with coercive beauty standards hacking and battering at female flesh, where’s the object of its anxiety? How might our characters feel about it, either in others or themselves? 

The film isn’t bad. The anachronistic fairy tale feel of it is mostly quite well-realized, with a demented Renaissance-era plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren) in pure white Dead Ringers couture, the straightforward depiction of silkworms and maggots sewing Cinderella’s (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) dress for the ball, and other confident little worldbuilding touches. The shot composition, particularly in darker interior sequences, is pleasantly reminiscent of oil paintings, though elsewhere the colors are a touch anemic. Myren gives a strong performance as the insecure and boy-crazy Elvira, who goes from charmingly out to lunch to a kind of human animal obsessed with torturing herself and with the effortless natural beauty of her stepsister, Agnes. It’s interesting that Prince Julian is so vacant, a dead-eyed sociopath with Ken doll good looks. There’s plenty to like, it’s just that none of it amounts to much.

The Substance succeeds with sheer brute force, taking material about gender, desirability, and sexism and ramming it down the viewer’s throat with an iron pole. The Ugly Stepsister just doesn’t have an equivalent force to animate its tired analyses of body and gender politics. It’s hard to be a woman, corsets, crash dieting, jealousy, fighting for the attention of vacuous and sexually violent men with such ferocity and determination that women themselves become equally vacuous and hateful. Films have explored this territory again and again, and while The Ugly Stepsister is made with evident skill and thought, it has nothing new, and nothing truly masterful, to offer in its retread. Where The Substance made a meal of its protagonists’ emptiness, The Ugly Stepsister is merely empty.