‘The Ugly Stepsister’ Remixes Cinderella With Nauseating Body Horror for a Biting Commentary on Beauty Standards — Sundance

variety.com:

William Earl It all started with Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt envisioning a bloody shoe. “I’ve been working on female characters that are struggling with their bodies through my short films,” she says. “It was in the development process of one of these films that I was having a creative nap, and suddenly this little piece of the Brothers Grimm version of ‘Cinderella‘ came to me.

I just imagined my character thinking that she fit the shoe, but then realizing that her shoe was full of blood. She’d actually cut off her toes to fit the shoe.” This dark spin on the classic lore was the first step of Blichfeldt’s “The Ugly Stepsister,” which is debuting at Sundance on Thursday via Shudder.

Blichfeldt, who wrote and directed the feature, wanted to explore the story not from Cinderella’s viewpoint but rather from that of her eternally maligned stepsisters.

In her story, Elvira (Lea Myren) undergoes several stomach-churning procedures to attain the beauty she believes she needs to marry Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth).