2025 has been an excellent year forhorror, asCompanionandSinnerspack theatres with fresh takes on the genre’s many tropes. With a 97 percent Critic Rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Ugly Stepsister deserves to be in that company. However, thanks to a limited release, it has passed by all but the most ardent fans.
Ending its cinematic run with just under $750,000 to its name, The Ugly Stepsister is not the smash hit thatSinners is proving to be as it continues to climb the all-time horror list. But as a foreign-language film released in only a handful of theatres, that gross is mightily impressive. Likewise, so are its excellent review scores and the fact it has generated any buzz at all. On streaming, that may all pay dividends.
The Ugly Stepsister also arrives in UK cinemas today.
The Ugly Stepsister Is “A Masterful Application Of Gore”
Next month, The Ugly Stepsister will arrive on Shudder and AMC+, where it will hopefully make more of a mark in the public consciousness. A dark, body-horror retelling of Cinderella, it focusses on one of the titular ugly stepsisters (Elvira) of the tale, though several details from Cinderella (inclding the names and magical elements) are changed.
Elvira’s mother wants her to marry the prince, rather than her newly adopted stepdaughter, Agnes. But rather than sabotage Agnes' chances, as happens in the original fairytale, the mother instead forces Elvira through a series of grotesque, primitive, and mechanical cosmetic surgeries in order to improve her looks.
It tackles similar themes to 2024’s big body horror The Substance, which struck such a chord with audiences it became Mubi’s highest ever grossing movie, racking up $82 million off an $18 million budget. This momentum even carried it to the Oscars, where Demi Moore’s loss for Best Actress was one of the stories of the season -even if she doesn’t think it should have been.
The overall Critical Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates key talking points from the reviews into a bite sized summary, says “taking a hammer and chisel to a quintessential fairy tale, The Ugly Stepsister’s masterful application of gore and subversion are the stuff that nightmares are made of.” Other reviews call it “fantastical”, “grotesque”, “sexual”, and “twisted”. But doing a Brothers Grimm fairy tale as a horror is not too far from the original intention. In fact, theDisneyversion we’re all familiar with changes just as much.
In the original tale, the stepsisters are still forced to try on Cinderella’s shoes, so cut off their toes and parts of their heels in order to fit - their treachery is discovered when the prince finds bloodstains on the inside of the shoe. There is a long history of body horror entwined with this tale. As punishment for their deception, the stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by birds. The Ugly Stepsister will offer a more sympathetic look at their story when it arrives on streaming next month.
