Emilie Blichfeldt’s “The Ugly Stepsister” is an unnerving, grisly twist on the Cinderella narrative. The age-old fable is spun into new registers of intense body horror. Its latent sexual enquiries are ferreted out, lurid and searching and scathing. Characters are flipped, the beautiful remain banished, and the unpleasant triumphant for long. Even when the tables are turned, it’s too late. It’s a bloody, disturbing rendition the film offers, with ample unease and provocation, not shying from the explicit and outrageous.

The director wants to interject familiar templates with vicious bursts of pure genre statement. It’s spiked with fearless gestures and an affinity for overt horror, capitalising on all the hidden impulses in the original text. In its new weave, beauty, its impossible standards exact a horrible, punishing price, far more severe than its aspirant could have ever imagined. Greed pushes her down an abyss of devastation.