I saw this on the 15th of May, 2025, at the independent cinema.
It’s a dark retelling of Cinderella, from the perspective of the stepsister. It’s heavy on gore, body horror, and general torture porn, and even after being hardened by The Substance and Kinds of Kindness, I had to look away.
You know the story, so I won’t rehash it here. Essentially, it’s a critique of beauty culture. The operations the stepsister undergoes to become pretty so the Prince will marry her are shown in groteque detail, mediaeval-style: using a hammer and chisel to reshape her nose, a massive fish-hook to sew fake eyelashes into her eyes, swallowing a tapeworm to become thin (and later regurgitating it, twenty feet long, with a host of larvae, in perhaps the most vomit-inducing thing I’ve ever seen), and hacking off her toes with a meat cleaver in the final act so she fits into the slipper.
All of these things are shown in unbroken close-ups, and you genuinely cannot tell if they are using prosthetics because it is so lifelike. In the fake eyelashes scene, you can literally see her eyeball rolling around in panic (taking up most of a cinema screen) while the fishhook pushes against the delicate skin under her eyes, and eventually pricks through, with beads of blood rolling down, and then the thread is pulled through, tugging skin with it, pristine at first and then turning crimson.
Ok I’ll stop. The beauty culture critique was actually particularly well done, and not just in the usual superficial individual level. It’s shown how she has no prospects and limited money, how she (and her family) need the support to live, how her beauty is their ticket to security, and how they’ll do anything to get it. It’s all structural, and in another masterstroke, none of is it based on the men involved. She bases her love for the prince on a book of poems he has published: when he is actually on screen he’s shown to be a coarse boor, a little ugly to boot. The audience knows whoever ends up with him will not be happy; they also know it is better than the alternative of poverty.
Throughout, there were particularly meaningful glances between the women, as they did degrading things to ensure their security. Between the stepsister and other girls at school, resolving to eat less, between the other stepsister and her mother, as she prepares to perform fellatio on a count she met at the ball, between the stepsister and Cinderella as Cinderella is being taken from behind by a stable boy she loves. Interestingly, they are not all commiseration: the glances are simply understanding, empathy (not sympathy), and alternately flashes of revulsion and competition. It’s a recognition of what they all have to do, and yet only intermittent solidarity for it.
One final note: the moral message of the film was really complex, and I’m not sure I fully got it. You might expect that in a modern retelling of this sort, the stepsister is the real hero, misunderstood, and hated by people who hate women for caring about appearences. Alternatively, you might expect that we are shown that Cinderella, for all her beauty, is a horrible, selfish persion, and constantly breaks the code of girlhood by trampling on the stepsister to get a man’s affection. Neither of these happens. Cinderella is beautiful, and quite normal: sometimes selfish, sometimes generous, and loving. The stepsister is ugly, and a worse, more jealous person than Cinderella, and yearns to be pretty, for the love of the prince. She undergoes a series of horrible treatments to become pretty, and she does become pretty! And yet, and yet, she is still upstaged at the ball, and thence begins her spiral of destruction, hacking her toes off, falling down the stairs and being brutalised by it (seriously, read the IMDb parents’ guide), and ending up uglier than ever.
However, at the end of the film, the stepsister is redeemed, by her sister, who is shown throughout to be unconcerned with her beauty, and untouched by the men of the film. She is rescued from the presence of her mother, and they run away together. At the start, the stepsister is quite young, “before her blood” as the mother says. She gets her period about halfway, and she’s presented to be a lot more grown-up by the end, and much more beatiful than the stepsister.
So, in the end, I think the central message was about the interaction between beauty culture and femininity. On the one hand, it says that inner beauty is paramount, and those who chase looks for status and security will always be upstaged, and end up spiritually and physically poorer for it. On the other hand, a rejection of this entire system is spiritually purer and to be sought. I don’t quite like that, because for all the examination of the structural imposition of the beauty rat-race earlier in the film, it doesn’t also present the downsides of rejecting it at all. If rejecting it had no downsides, why would anyone not do it?
A really really good, memorable film, but I don’t think I’m smart enough to properly understand the message.