The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
Directed by Emilie Blichfeldt
In a fairy-tale kingdom where beauty is a brutal business, Elvira battles to compete with her incredibly beautiful stepsister, Agnes, and she will go to any length to catch the Prince’s eye.
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25 films that influenced The Ugly Stepsister
What critics say influenced The Ugly Stepsister
…much like last year’s The Substance, examines the lengths women will go to in order to be chosen by men…
It’s The Substance by way of the Brothers Grimm.
The association between beauty and evil is hardly transgressive; The Substance only just finished its awards run. Like Fargeat’s film, The Ugly Stepsister opts to blame women for the impossible beauty standards that persevere, and make them the cruellest characters in the film.
Think “The Substance” (2024) adapts the Brothers Grimm’s “Aschenputtel,” which translates into “The Little Ash Girl,” except if “Cinderella” was told from the stepsisters’ point of view.
…much like the Oscar-nominated “The Substance,” a body-horror dramedy that with “The Ugly Stepsister” would make for an appropriate double bill.
The gory effects don’t reach the bloody excess of, say, “The Substance,”…
Blichfeldt’s premiere will remind body horror fans of other amazing firsts from Coralie Fergeat’s “Revenge” (2017) or Julia Ducournau’s “Raw” (2016).
Director
Sofia Coppola
Critics invoke Coppola by name, and compare The Ugly Stepsister to 2 of Coppola’s films.
Visuals
On Coppola, rather than any one film
Sofia Coppola’s ahistoric cultural notes within “The Ugly Stepsister” such as the music and the dance choreography…
…there is most definitely some Sofia Coppola influence here—namely, 2006’s Marie Antoinette, complete with the more modern music (albeit instrumental, 80s-sounding offerings and not outright pop hits from the Decade of Excess)…
Its aesthetic is a mix between the bewitching visuals in both Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and Marie Antoinette, mixed with Lucky McGee’s disquieting May and Jack Hill’s 1967 Spider Baby.
The influence of Sofia Coppola and Marie Antionette is visible as well, particularly in the 1980s-inspired synthesizer soundtrack…
Its aesthetic is a mix between the bewitching visuals in both Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and Marie Antoinette, mixed with Lucky McGee’s disquieting May and Jack Hill’s 1967 Spider Baby.
Director
David Cronenberg
Critics invoke Cronenberg by name, and compare The Ugly Stepsister to 1 of Cronenberg’s films.
Visuals
On Cronenberg, rather than any one film
David Cronenberg’s list of spiritual directing daughters is growing, and they delight less in human nature than to warn of the suicidal side of society that demonizes the organic self in favor of the monstrous distortion…
…it is the work of Julia Ducournau and David Cronenberg that most inspired Blichfeldt in her telling of the story, realizing that the body horror route…
It’s a watch that will remind many horror loyalists of Dario Argento and David Cronenberg with its disinterest in flinching away from the rough parts.
There are echoes of Dead Ringers in some of the surgery scenes…
And yes, it all has a very Bridgerton sort of feel (think: the Featherington family), minus the total lack of romance and plus the glaring spotlight on the horrifying things that women did to themselves in a bid to look beautiful so that they might “secure their future” a.k.a. a man.
…a Busby Berkekely-inspired number that plays like something out of an episode of Bridgerton…
Since this takes place in a very Bridgerton-like time period with gothic undertones…
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But it’s definitely also comparable, if not moreso, to obsession movies like Black Swan and Luca Guadagnino’s version of Suspiria, where the women will stop at nothing to prove they’re good enough.
What follows is a grim quest for perfection that makes Black Swan look like a movie starring Natalie Portman.
Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent (certainly not Wicked: For Good) remains the standard-bearer for such flip-the-script fairy tales…
…movies like Maleficent and Frozen remixed and reimagined the villains of other iconic fables into heroes more than ten years ago…
Its aesthetic is a mix between the bewitching visuals in both Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled and Marie Antoinette, mixed with Lucky McGee’s disquieting May and Jack Hill’s 1967 Spider Baby.
It goes full throttle on the body horror in the way that is reminiscent of American Mary (dir. Jen and Sylvia Soskta, 2012)…
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…movies like Maleficent and Frozen remixed and reimagined the villains of other iconic fables into heroes more than ten years ago…
On Wheatley, rather than any one film
…one might be reminded of the work of Ben Wheatley during a delirious dance scene…