The film’s creative gore alone cannot paper over the ultimate flimsiness of Blichfeldt’s concept, which amounts to an adolescent scrawl of fairytale satire.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 25, 2025

A smart, bold, and visually rich work that both enchants and challenges.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 25, 2025

The Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt roasts conventional heroines and female beauty standards in this gruesome, hilarious reworking of Cinderella.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2025

This is a movie hyper-aware of the sexual and patriarchal imagery of Cinderella... Blichfeldt has made an elegant debut.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 24, 2025

Blichfeldt revels in the grotesque and gory, pushing things to their limit, with an unmistakable sense of glee.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 18, 2025

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

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 17, 2025

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

| Apr 17, 2025

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.

| Mar 19, 2025

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.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 17, 2025

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.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 15, 2025

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

| Feb 3, 2025

The Ugly Stepsister is savagely brutal and yet strangely beautiful.

| Jan 30, 2025

Blichfedlt’s aesthetic ambition -- hyper-pop prevails here -- and a committed performance from Les Myren as the titular stepsister help enliven a film that, at times, is weighed down by its more farcical antics.

| Jan 26, 2025

With her wonderfully expressive eyes, Myren is a revelation here, carefully maintaining the entire tone of the piece with Blichfeldt.

| Jan 25, 2025

An impressively nasty first feature from Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt, this is a grimmer than Grimm take on Cinderella.

| Original Score: B | Jan 25, 2025

Its point of view is specific to its teenage protagonist, which limits its emotional range. But it’s effective as a grotesque spectacle.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 25, 2025

Contrasting how her female characters feel with the expectations men put on them, Blichfeldt makes clear that impossible beauty standards are the unfairest of them all, whether in the real world or this twisted fictional kingdom.

| Jan 25, 2025

While “The Ugly Stepsister” doesn’t go much deeper than Dr. Esthetique’s scalpel, the brazenly grotesque surface of the piece might just be deep enough.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 24, 2025

The Ugly Stepsister’s grossness feels organic, both to its source material and to our own lives.

| Jan 24, 2025

The film ends up succeeding better as a stylish, graphic fairytale riff than as a thoughtful exploration of the rigid definitions of female beauty.

| Jan 24, 2025