'The Ugly Stepsister' is nominated as one of the best, and most surprising, horror films of the year
There are numerous studies that support the relationship between how we perceive people with the gift of physical beauty - whatever the prevailing canon - and how we relate it to concepts such as kindness, human warmthetc.
Perhaps this example that I am going to give right now is a bit extravagant, but think about the story of Cinderella. No one puts themselves in the place of the stepsisters, ugly and unpleasant above all, who were systematically rejected by a prince who only paid attention to their appearance. This example, precisely, is the one that the Norwegian Emilie Blichfeldt has taken when undertaking her surprising The ugly stepsisterwhich many are related to The substancebecause it has a lot of body horror and also a lot of black humor.
If national and international critics have surrendered to the evidence of being in front of one of the best films of the year, Sitges has done the same, granting it the highest award to this film that was nominated for the Audience Award in the Panorama Section of the last Berlin Festival.
A touch of genius, without a doubt, and a new pain in the ass of all those straight men who say that 'feminism is crossing the line': placing the focus on the ugly stepsister, on how she had to feel throughout her life being ignored by a palace that rewarded above all else the harmony of faces and tall, slender bodies.
The film has been awarded by the Sitges jury, made up of Jovanka Vuckovic (Riot Girls), Laura Pedro, Mary Harron (American Psycho), Hernan Findling (I had the heart) y Peter Chan (Dragon (Wu xia)) by "the originality with which he reinvents a classic story".
The director has stated in an interview for the half Howlsthat his film was the perfect vehicle to denounce the "very misogynistic culture of treating women as objects of male desire and that, even today, we continue to do this to ourselves, even though we are emancipated, even though we can be masters of ourselves... we are still treating ourselves as objects."
In the film, aesthetic treatments appear that could practically be considered torture, such as sewing hair into the eyelids to have thicker eyelashes. The director establishes a parallel between the techniques 'before' and those of now: "Tapeworm is also a real treatment that people I used to do. "When I wrote the movie, I didn't know that Ozempic was going to be the modern version."
One of those films that are released very occasionally, original and not afraid to enter thorny terrain, with scenes that turn the stomach and even provoke laughter. For all this, we have to go in droves to the cinema to see The ugly stepsister.
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