The stepsister isn’t ugly, though she certainly thinks she is, and is led to believe so, in fact, by others, and eventually by herself. Her own mother, most perniciously, considers her “hopeless.” In prospects, yes, since their family is not of the landed gentry, and have unluckily married into a family who is of that class but also happens to be broke; and looks-wise, it is true that Elvira (the film’s titular stepsister, played by Lea Myren) is no conventional stunner—though she is hampered more by naivete and social awkwardness than by any serious physical “lacks.” But reality hardly ever trumps perception, and when you are called ugly by everyone in your life, ugly has a way of getting in.

This is the deeper concern of the Norwegian debut writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister, beneath the obvious examination of unhealthy beauty standards and corrupted idealization. These standards can be blatantly unfair, but they are also parasitical, and if one is too impressionable—as all children are—then those same standards have a way of substituting self with the oft-false mirror of comparison. […]