Director: Emilie Blichfeldt
Year: 2025
Country: Norway/Denmark/Romania/Poland/Sweden
Alternate Titles: Den stygge stesøsteren
Genre: Body-Horror
Plot:
Preparing for a special ball, a woman learns that her standards of beauty are too low and must undergo a rigorous surgical and training regime to prepare her for the event while dealing with her stepsisters’ devious plans for the same event which put her chances in serious jeopardy.
Review:
This was a rather intriguing if somewhat problematic overall feature. When this one works the best is due to the opening treatment of the girls and how it's all set up to offer a commentary on the nature of beauty standards in women. The practice of openly offering transformative surgery to help girls be more beautiful that are then performed in gruesome, excruciating fashion offering the close-up shots of the dental surgery or nose job the helpers perform on her which carries on throughout the rest of the film with the bizarre covering she wears after the event, keeps this one quite open about how women must transform themselves for the sake of beauty and winning a husband.
With this all being hammered home by the point of all the dance training, physical transformations, and the body control they have to undertake all for the sake of winning the affections of a prince, the outward display created here to make her appear more beautiful to others much like the others in the classes with her who are going through the same process to no avail. It helps to impose such a telling commentary on the societal expectations that they're all essentially forced to go through this grueling and graphic process, which comes off exceptionally well.
The whole thing, though, is just undone by a wholly lethargic and underwhelming tempo that tries to keep hammering home the whole concept of the transformative process going through everything, which isn't all that interesting to sit through. The trials and tribulations that are showcased throughout here make for more of a commentary on the nature of beauty and imperfections than anything but they're repeated so much it starts to drain the energy level done considerably during this first half as it can only go on for so many instances offering dance classes and posture training before the point is made and it just becomes redundant.
It also doesn't help that so much of this content is reliant on how the fabled fairy tale is awkwardly shoehorned into the storyline so that the various figures there to represent the connections to how it all takes place with the finale being the celebrated ball that leaves everything with the same taste as usual in the story. It doesn't change much and makes this one rather lacking at the wrong point in the storyline, which causes this to leave with a sour taste due to how it ends, which is enough to hold it back.
Overview: **/5
A likable enough if overall problematic take on the fairy tale, there’s enough here to be quite enjoyable in the long run as long as the flaws aren’t that detrimental or damaging to the viewer. Those who are intrigued by this kind of story, are curious about it, or don’t mind the issues will have a lot to like while most others out there should heed caution with this one.
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