In her Sundance-bowing feature, the director Emilie Blichfeldt reimagines the fairytale from the perspective of a stepsister desperate for beauty.

Emilie Blichfeldt's feature debut "The Ugly Stepsister" is a grim and gruesome affair not for the faint of heart

Most fairy tales were told and retold countless times before Walt Disney ever got his hands on them, and yet, the sensibility behind such animated classics as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Sleeping Beauty" has proven so popular on such an international scale that few know these stories' darker origins.

Review: Emilie Blichfeldt's feminist body horror fairytale 'The Ugly Stepsister' isn't more than skin deep, but it's squeamish enough that way.

The Ugly Stepsister,' a nightmarish fairytale reimagining, serves Sam Raimi-levels of mayhem with its critique of brutal beauty standards.

The Norwegian film "The Ugly Stepsister," which premiered Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival, ramps up the darkness of the original "Cinderella" fairy tale.

Increasingly the location that the festival employs when they want to show Sundance attendees something a bit off the beaten path, the Park City Library premiered two features that aren’t like anything else in the program.

The Ugly Stepsister takes viewers to an enchanted kingdom in which impossible standards of female beauty lead to graphic violence and gross-out gore, with Lea Myren playing the titular character, who is usually one of the villains of the classic fairy tale.

W ritten and directed by Emilie Blichfeldt, The Ugly Stepsister is a subversive body horror that twists the familiar tale of Cinderella and gives us a psychological beauty-is-pain