Cinderella's stepsister stars in the most brutal and bloody film of the year.

More than a thousand years before Walt Disney thought of adapting fairy tales, young children in China were told the story of Ye-Hsien, a young woman abused by her family who loses her shoe at a party. The similarities are too many to suggest it's a mere coincidence—remember, Cinderella had abnormally small feet, a beauty trait that harks back to lotus feet or the practice of foot binding since the Song Dynasty—but the tale came to us thanks to the Brothers Grimm and Perrault. Their versions are far more gory and bloody than Disney's legendary tale : Cinderella decapitates her stepmother with a trunk, her stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit the shoe, and they end up blinded because pigeons peck out their eyes as they leave church. In other words, it was common practice at that time.

Since then, we've seen a multitude of variations on the Cinderella story, usually sweetened and adapted to modern times (there's even a version starring Jennifer Lopez ), because if there's one thing that defines fairy tales, it's that they can be told over and over again. But now comes the darkest, bloodiest, and goriest version since the Grimm brothers decided to put pen to paper: The Ugly Stepsister , a Norwegian production hitting theaters this Friday and the debut feature by Emilie Blichfeldt. The young director joins the ranks alongside French directors Coralie Fargeat ( The Substance ) and Julia Ducournau ( Titane ) to show us that it's women who have recently been creating the most brutal body horror films . If The Substance made you gag, you'd better stay away from this film.

This time, Blichfeldt has decided to focus on the story of one of Cinderella's stepsisters instead of the usual protagonist of the tale. Elvira (Lea Myren , a canonically beautiful actress who has had to put a lot of prosthetics on her to appear unattractive) is the eldest daughter of a rather heartless widow ( Ane Dahl Torp ), who decides to marry a seemingly rich widower who dies on their wedding night, no less, and who is left to rot in a room for the rest of the film, because for some incomprehensible reason they do not feel like paying for his proper burial.

When both Elvira's mother and Agnes-Cinderella, the widower's daughter ( Thea Sofie Loch Næss ) discover that neither of the two newly related families actually has any money, they all decide to put their efforts into the commendable task of wooing Prince Julian (prince of the kingdom, played by Isaac Calmroth ) at the palace balls. Up to this point, everything is similar to the storybook, except that the prince is a horrible person, Cinderella is not as virginal as she appears and the envy that Elvira feels towards her stepsister simmers until it explodes, logically, in the last part of the film.

With a lot of ugliness, slightly kitsch pastel tones ( Sofia Coppola 's Marie Antoinette has done a lot of damage), and camera zooms that look like B-movie films, The Ugly Stepsister criticizes the canons of beauty and the brutalities that women do to be beautiful and please men with extra blood and cosmetic surgeries from an apparently Edwardian era . Because some of the procedures that Elvira undergoes throughout the film in order to be beautiful and conquer the prince existed: before rhinoplasties were invented, rudimentary nose jobs were already performed (or attempted), and although it was a later "fad", the famous diet of ingesting tapeworm eggs with the purpose of losing weight (and perhaps dying in the attempt) is also shown.

It's not the first time, nor will it be the last, that a fairy tale has been transformed into a horror story or a dark fable. Snow White, a tale of terror (1997), Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), The Lure (2015, The Little Mermaid turned into a horror musical), or Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor) from 1978 are just a few examples, although there are many more. There are many reasons for this: they are universal and easy to reinterpret; contemporary audiences look for new but familiar things, in which they can nostalgically revisit the stories that defined their childhood, but in an adult way; and, as we pointed out at the beginning of the article, fairy tales were already dark in their origins, although Disney later sweetened them.

Some of the procedures that Elvira undergoes in order to look beautiful and win the prince's heart existed in the Edwardian era.

The Ugly Stepsister more than delivers on all those fronts, although for anyone with a sensitive stomach it can be an unpleasant experience, with a rather apotheotic ending and an unsubtle and overly grotesque metaphor, in some cases even pornographic. Blichfeldt spits (almost literally) blood in our faces to remind us that vanity and aesthetic obsessions, so common in the TikTok era, can end truly badly, even if we're not going to cut off our toes to make our shoes fit. Although the ending is misleading, who really comes out worse, Cinderella, who because she's beautiful ends up with the prince, who is a hideous human being, or Elvira, who at least has the support (and sisterhood) of her little sister? The viewer will have to choose between doses of laborious screams and synthesizer music. This Friday in theaters.

More than a thousand years before Walt Disney thought of adapting fairy tales, young children in China were told the story of Ye-Hsien, a young woman abused by her family who loses her shoe at a party. The similarities are too many to suggest it's a mere coincidence—remember, Cinderella had abnormally small feet, a beauty trait that harks back to lotus feet or the practice of foot binding since the Song Dynasty—but the tale came to us thanks to the Brothers Grimm and Perrault. Their versions are far more gory and bloody than Disney's legendary tale : Cinderella decapitates her stepmother with a trunk, her stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to fit the shoe, and they end up blinded because pigeons peck out their eyes as they leave church. In other words, it was common practice at that time.