The Ugly Stepsister (2025) on Netflix
NR20251h 49mComedyDramaHorrorSci-Fi
Elvira competes with her stepsister Agnes in a kingdom where beauty decides everything. Her mother Rebekka wants her to catch Prince Julian and subjects her to painful cosmetic surgery.
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- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.0/1048,938 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Rebekka is a widow with two daughters, Elvira and Alma. She marries Otto, a widower whose daughter Agnes is beautiful. Otto dies during the wedding dinner, most of his assets are seized, and neither spouse had brought money of their own. Royal heralds then invite every noble young virgin to a ball, where Prince Julian is to pick a bride. To keep the family from poverty, Rebekka decides that Elvira must win him. Elvira keeps a book of the prince's poems and dreams of the match, but Rebekka thinks her too ugly and puts her through a series of painful procedures. At Sophie von Kronenberg's finishing school, Agnes is placed with the pretty girls while Elvira is sent to the back with the plainer ones.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Emilie Blichfeldt began developing The Ugly Stepsister during her thesis at the Norwegian Film School, where it was first about a woman with a "talking vulva that tells her she's lonely", before she drew on the Brothers Grimm's "Aschenputtel" and reimagined it as a stepsister cutting off her toes for the glass slipper.- Blichfeldt was unfamiliar with body horror until she watched David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash in 2015, which sent her on a deep dive into Cronenberg and the Italian directors Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci; their films and Julia Ducournau's Raw (2016) led her to use body horror.
- Growing up, Blichfeldt watched the Norwegian dub of the "camp" film Three Wishes for Cinderella, which she credited with helping create the "timeless, once-upon-a-time feeling" of The Ugly Stepsister's visual style.
