Category Archives: 2025

The Ugly Stepsister

The Ugly Stepsister 4 1/2 suns

The Ugly Stepsister (from Norway) takes the fairy tale Cinderella and turns it upside down and inside out making it a body horror movie about envy and body image.  In this take of the classic we see things from the point of view of Cinderella’s stepsister, Elvira who is on a mission to get the attention of the kingdom’s prince at the ball and marry him and save the family from poverty. The problem is that she is rather homely and fat. That won`t do so with her mother’s help, a doctor’s facial modifications, a finishing school and an internal parasite, she sets on a scheme to make herself beautiful. Oh, and there is also the little problem of that attractive annoying stepsister that must be dealt with.  I had never heard before that there was so much sex and baudy language in this classic story.  I guess I must have missed something.  The actress playing Elvira really goes through a range of emotions going from a naive yiung girl to a monster who will do whatever it takes to reach her goal.  The body mutilations become more and more extreme as she seeks to become attractive and meet the world’s expectations of female beauty. There were many exclamations from the audience during each cringeworthy step. It all culminates with the fitting of the slipper and the removal of the “parasite”. The theme is on par with last year’s “The Substance” though maybe not to that extreme.  It’s all about how society sees women as objects,  judging them by some impossible standard and how some women seek to meet them.  And for fans of horror genre it’s a lot of fun.

LUZ

LUZ 5 suns

This international drama deals with estranged family and loss and efforts to heal, covering two different families who are a world apart. There is an element of technology in the form of virtual reality that links the two stories together. The first is set in the Chinese city of Chongqing about an older former gangster who has lost touch with his grown daughter who now makes a living streaming on the internet. In the second story a woman in Hong Kong travels to Paris to be with her stepmother whose health has started to fail. The stepmother is played by Isabelle Hubert who unfortunately couldn’t be at Sundance! The two stories are connected by a painting of a deer in the woods painted by the young woman’s deceased father and is now in a night club connected to the ex-gangster. Both individuals are drawn to a world in virtual reality called LUZ where the players interact and search for the mystical deer in the painting. There they meet and try to find answers to what they are searching for. The stories share themes of brokenness and healing between family members. At the Q & A writer/ director Flora Lau talked of the long process in making the movie and the iterations it went through. There were rewrites even after filming started where she made it less about the virtual world in favor of the family stories. I’d say it was a successful decision. The audience loved it. This movie is in both Chinese and French. Isabelle Hubert appeared in a recorded message greeting Sundance before the film. Wish she could have been there!