Eye of the Beholder

The plot of The Ugly Stepsister is Cinderella as seen from the point of view of Elvira, the elder stepsister. As the film opens, Elvira's mother, Rebekka, has married Otto and moved herself and her girls into his house. At the wedding feast, however, Otto dies of apoplexy. This sends Otto's own daughter, Agnes, into a depressive spiral, and in one such mode, she tells Elvira that her father only married Rebekka for her money. "What money?" Elvira declares before storming off to tell her mother that her dead husband wasn't rich after all. The entire family is now in dire financial straits, because Rebekka is already negotiating the sale of the estate's assets to pay its debts. A glimmer of hope arrives in the form of an announcement from the palace. Prince Julian is to wed and will choose his bride from the virgins of the kingdom. Elvira adores Prince Julian. She reads his poems from a book she keeps with her all the time and aspires to marry him even before the palace announces its wedding ball. Agnes is indifferent. She's got a beau, but she's also penniless, so she plays along. Rebekka will only support Elvira's chances though, even when faced with Elvira's shortcomings. She sends her to Dr. Esthetique for a make-over--removing her braces and resculpting her nose among other things--and then packs her off to finishing lessons under the strict eye of Madame Vanya and her partner, Sophie von Kronenberg. There, she learns deportment and grace, but she's initially hopeless. She also comes into possession of the egg of a tapeworm, which she swallows in order to lose weight. The mountain seems too high to surmount, though, because Agnes is too perfect and she overhears the Prince out in the woods commenting on her appearance with the vow that he could never "fuck that!" Elvira has fortune on her side, though, and Agnes is disqualified from attending the ball when Rebekka discovers that she is not a virgin. She keeps her in the house as a scullery rather than have a scandal on the eve of the ball. She destroys Agnes's dress and leaves her at home. Agnes has help, though, when the ghost of her mother summons silkworms to weave her a new dress. At the ball, Elvira's "improvements" catch the prince's eye and he chooses her for the dance. Elvira is not well, though. The tapeworm has sapped her nutrition and there are ominous rumblings from her stomach. She holds it together long enough to see a mysterious veiled stranger enter the ballroom and sweep the prince off his feet. When the veil is momentarily lifted, only Elvira sees that it is Agnes come to thwart her. But Agnes's enchantment ends at midnight and she flees the ball, losing one of her shoes. The prince vows to marry the girl who fits the shoe. At home, Elvira wrestles the other shoe away and finds that her foot is too big for it. Drastic action is required...

A warning to the curious. I am a jaded viewer of hundreds, maybe thousands, of horror movies. There are things in this film to shock even a jaded viewer like me. The filmmakers don't pull their punches here. If you are sensitive to this...well, don't say I didn't warn you.

One of the first trans women I ever met was having serious health problems when I knew her. She had indulged in silicone pumping, the practice of injecting silicone into areas of the body one wants to reshape. She had done her lips, her ass, her hips. Maybe some other areas, too. Silicone pumping is an underground practice pursued by women who have no other recourse to reconstructive medicines. The silicone used is not often medical grade. Sometimes it's caulk from a hardware store. Sometimes it's not even silicone at all. Once in the body, it can--and usually does--migrate, creating all sorts of health problems of which disfigurement is only the most benign. I was still early in my own transition, not even on hormone therapy yet, so she offered to set me up with her "provider." I'm only 5'6" and I don't have an Adam's apple, so I could already pass pretty well at the time without such extreme measures. I turned her down. I heard that she died a couple of years after I knew her. She wasn't old. I don't think she was even 35 yet when she passed. I thought of her while I was watching The Ugly Stepsister, a movie that connected with my experience of transness with more force and more visceral awareness of my own body and it's shortcomings than any other film I've ever seen. Of course, it's not a film about or even adjacent to transness. Not intentionally, anyway. It's a film about the horrible straitjacket of beauty norms for all women. But as misogyny is amplified when directed at trans women, so too is the relentless imperative of cisgender beauty norms. We often take things to extreme places cis people would never dream of going. Not because we want to, but because our safety and even our sense of self often require it of us. This is no less true of Elvira, the protagonist of The Ugly Stepsister, even if she's not trans. There's a scene early in the film when she's listening to the assessment of the quack plastic surgeon, Dr. Esthetique. When she glances into the operating room, she sees a woman mopping up a pool of blood. So, so much blood. Beauty is a bloody business. Beauty is pain and suffering for those not blessed with the natural grace and looks of Elvira's stepsister, Agnes.

I once knew another trans woman who mostly had the means to fund her own feminizing surgeries--she had had veneers put on her teeth, a face lift, a boob job. I thought she was beautiful when I knew her, but she was never satisfied with herself. She thought she was a proverbial brick because she didn't have the hourglass shape she wanted. She mentioned to me that she wanted to find someone to remove a couple of her ribs, a surgery no reputable doctor in the United States will perform. I lost track of her soon after. I heard she had gone to Mexico to find someone to do her bottom surgery for cheap. I think she had burned through all her money and had to resort to more desperate measures. I wonder if she ever looked for someone to remove her ribs outside the US. It's this sort of thing that encourages transphobes to equate us with surgery addicts and amputation fetishists. One argument against transgender care is that no other therapy removes otherwise healthy tissue, but that's demonstrably not true. Boob reductions are a thing, as are mastectomies for women who have the gene that makes breast cancer a near certainty. You may have heard that Angelina Jolie had such a surgery, prompting sexists worldwide to lament the loss of her feminine charms. It was in the news. So at the end of The Ugly Stepsister, I recognize the light of madness in Elvira's eyes when she attempts to cut off her toes, and I've met people who would go to exactly such lengths to conform to beauty norms.

I know a few trans women who have had FFS. This stands for "Facial Feminization Surgery," not the more apt "For fuck's sake!" Many such procedures are things like lip lifts and filler, eyelifts, facelifts, all standard procedures trans women share with cis women. But some of the more invasive techniques involve the breaking of bones. One surgeon has a brow-reduction technique that involves removing the front of the skull, the part over the sinuses, and repositioning it after grinding the bossing of the bone. Others involve breaking the jaw or sawing chunks out of it. There's a rhinoplasty procedure in The Ugly Stepsister performed with a chisel, and the only real difference in brutality between this and FFS is the use of anesthesia. I was at a conference once where one of the plastic surgeons who offered facial feminization to trans women held a meet and greet, and there was a familial resemblance among some of the other trans women in attendance, alums of the surgeon all. To put yourself in the hands of a surgeon to reshape one's face is to put oneself in the hands of that surgeon's prejudices and preferences as to what beauty is. You don't need to look at trans women to see this. There are plenty of celebrities who have gone to the same surgeons who wind up looking significantly similar to one another. The women who have surrounded the present (in 2025) administration all have a "look". One of my friends calls them all duck-faced authoritarian barbies. There is an ideological component to this that's always been there, but which at the present moment seems like it's been brought to the surface by our current protectors of the male gaze. It's not women who want this. It's powerful men, and by proxy, the women who act as handmaidens to that patriarchy, the kapos of femininity if you will. Don't think all of that is absent from this movie. The prince and his entourage are absolutely keen on a type. That that type is beyond the grasp of Elvira is the film's bitterest irony. That all of the women who are not of marrying age are enforcers is its second bitterest. For me, the emphasis of one specific kind of beauty enforced by the tastes of men tells me that some kinds of men have a depressingly unimaginative idea of what actually counts as beautiful.

Personally, I haven't had FFS, but I have had a hair transplant surgery which is FFS-adjacent. There's an analogous scene to that surgery here, too, in which Elvira has false eyelashes sewn to her eyelids. My own procedure involved removing a strip of scalp from the back of my head and dissecting it for the hair follicles--the ones on the back of the head are largely androgen insensitive, so better than the ones in the areas of male pattern baldness. The areas where my hair was thinning or gone were punctured with a specific needle and the resulting follicles were implanted. The whole thing took about twelve hours. I watched The Godfather Trilogy while they worked on me. My transplant was done with a local and I was awake for it. I couldn't feel the strip of scalp as they removed it, but I could hear it. It reminded me of that scene in Re-Animator where Dr. Hill peels the scalp of a cadaver. Same sound. Full marks to that sound effects artist. Again, the only difference in the brutality of Elvira's surgery and my own is anesthesia. Perhaps the trans-iest image in the film is related to this. Elvira starts to lose her hair from malnutrition, prompting her minders to put a wig on her head to cover it up. Same here, Elvira. Same.

Every time I go to see a therapist--less often these days, but I was required to go to a therapist to conform to the standards of care for trans people--one of the first things on their list is a series of questions concerning eating disorders. I don't have an eating disorder. Never had one. I am a diabetic, though, and lately, the big thing in diabetic care is Ozempic, which is an eating disorder in a pen needle. My doctor suggested I try it. I didn't like it. I didn't take it for long. I lost a shitload of weight, though. I wonder if I would have had the same shock of recognition for the scenes in The Ugly Stepsister with the tapeworm if I hadn't had those experiences. I wonder if some of my peers would go to that extreme. Given the standard inquiry about eating disorders from my therapists (I've had two), I rather think that some of them would.

I feel like I should caveat all of this by acknowledging that all of this represents pressures on cis women as well. Trans-misogyny is only an amped up version of the garden variety hatred of women our culture feels, after all. The fact that this film's modus operandi is exactly that--amped up misogyny--sticks the knife in and twists it for cis and trans women alike. Even so, I haven't seen this laid bare in a movie before. Not even in something like The Substance or American Mary, which are this film's fellow travelers.

The body horror element of the Cinderella story is right there in Grimm's version. Both of the ugly stepsisters cut off their toes and their heels in vain to fit into the glass slipper. The other stepsister in this film is not cast in the same role as Elvira. Alma acts as a kind of Greek chorus and conscience for her sister. She sees the game for what it is, and is repelled by her sister's transformation. Her day will come, the film suggests, because what is the function of women in patriarchy? The end of the film sees Alma choosing liberation. Whether that liberation can heal her sister is an open question. The last image in the film is a freeze frame of a couple of crows picking over the remains of the tapeworms Elvira vomited up a few minutes before. It's not a reassuring image.

This isn't only a body horror movie, though. One thought that kept picking at me as I watched the film and afterward was that this is a Jane Austen story gone horribly awry. The desperation of the Bennett sisters to find a husband to ward off penury is amplified in this film into a literal bloodsport. The strict role of women here isn't merely as objects of beauty, they are a means of gaining and losing fortunes. The calamity of Elvira's family is that both parties to Otto and Rebekka's marriage thought they were marrying up, which creates a perfect petri dish for the film's horrors to incubate. Even Rebekka, the proverbial wicked stepmother, isn't exempted from the pursuit of an advantageous alliance. Certainly her willingness to go down on one of the Prince's friends as her daughters flee the scene is the act of a desperate woman.

Agnes, this film's Cinderella, represents grace and beauty that is not only insurmountable for mere mortals, but incarnates it in a woman who doesn't even covet the prince. The scenes with the stablemaster suggest that even in her inevitable marriage to the prince, she will not be satisfied with him. The Prince is as much a token to be won as marriageable girls, after all, and are equally meaningless to the high-level players. This is very much a female gaze movie when it comes to sex. It's not coy about what it shows, because the "mystery" of women that men romanticize is absent from the physical realities this film embraces. It's not enough to dismantle the charade of beauty, this film shows sex for the awkward, rutting, physical act it is. That it uses the usually virginal image of Cinderella for this is subversive. While this is deconstructive, this film performs an even more shocking bit of epistemological legerdemain. The plot of the film is EXACTLY the same as you find in the fairy tale. They haven't changed anything about it, except for the point of view. A savvy viewer will realize that the stepsisters were done dirty by the fairy tale, whether by Charles Perrault or the Grimm's. The "wickedness" of the stepmother is entirely in keeping with the matrimonial derby that was society at the time. Oh, Rebekka is probably wicked enough, sure, but in promoting her daughter's chances with the Prince at the expense of her wayward stepdaughter is absolutely in the realm of good mothering. The film's cruelest conceit is the notion that Lea Myren, who plays Elvira, is "ugly," even when she's dressed in fat clothes and wearing braces. This alone suggests how twisted our values are when confronting the Cinderella story.

This is director Emilie Blichfeldt's first feature and it is precocious. She has an eye for composition and production design that is informed by six hundred years of European painting. The opening credit sequence is a good example of her approach. It's essentially a rolling still life of the ruins of the wedding feast. It looks sumptuous, like it comes from a Flemish painting from the baroque period. It is gorgeous. It's also crawling with worms and insects. Later, when we see the body of her husband lying in state, waiting for burial as Rebekka spends all her remaining money on prepping Elvira for the ball, he too is rotting, and crawling with insects and worms. The way this is shot recalls the credit sequence and acts as a memento mori of the sort that Flemish and Dutch painters sometimes included in their work to suggest a moral lesson in beauty: that it's all vanity. This is in keeping with the themes of the movie. Other shot compositions look to have been cribbed from the likes of Velasquez (one shot composed in deep focus reminds me of Las Meninas) while another has the soft-focus eroticism of Boucher or Fragonard. The costumes do some of the heavy lifting, too, particularly the one that the silkworms weave for Agnes and the tacky dress Elvira is given for the ball. The brace on Elvira's nose is ornate, made prettier than it has to be given its function, and represents the horrible beautiful that's at the core of the film. Blichfeldt is not above cribbing from cinematic sources, either, and using allusions as signifiers for her own concerns. The finishing school in this film might be home to one of the Three Mothers, for example, while one of its proprietors is named "von Kronenberg." The women who run the school are a touchstone of the film's intended queerness, too. Blitchfeldt knows her film's provenance and leaves the knife to let you know she knows.

I have the greatest sympathy for Elvira's pursuit of an ineffable and ungraspable beauty, and of her ultimate inability to bear the insufferable beauty that Agnes seems to have been gifted from on high. She's a spiritual sister to Salieri looking on as Mozart speaks with the Voice of God. I've sometimes felt the same envy and unjustness of the universe when confronted by very beautiful people, and even by some ordinarily beautiful people. I'm sure everyone has felt that to one degree or another. This is a film that is going to resonate for a long time, not least because when it lands its blows, it leaves bruises.

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If you want a fuller understanding of the concept of "trans-misogyny", interested parties--particularly cis people--are directed to Julia Serano's book, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Don't worry; it's intersectional. You might find something that's germane to your life the way The Ugly Stepsister is germane to mine. Note, I don't see any money from this.

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