Bold takes on Frankenstein and Cinderella open Sundance, while Juliette Lewis body-swaps with a chair

Because I will be covering the 2025 Sundance Film Festival entirely from snowy, frozen Chicago instead of snowy, frozen Park City, my screening options are limited. Only a select few films opted in to the festival’s online offerings this year, which means The A.V. Club won’t be getting a look at some until right at the end of the fest. Other movies will remain entirely exclusive to Utah, rewarding those who bundle up and book the Airbnb with more than just the flu. But that just means that it’s easier for me to avoid some of the in-person problems that tend to crop up. Problems like screening-derailing sound issues, tickets swapped at the last moment because a film was edited without the financier’s knowledge, or audience members vomiting in the aisle.

The latter, a marketing boon to be sure, reportedly happened during one of my favorites of the festival so far: The Ugly Stepsister (B). The impressively nasty first feature from Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt, this grimmer than Grimm take on Cinderella has already been snapped up by horror streamer Shudder, and it’s easy to see why. As Elvira (Lea Myren) gets put through a medieval body-horror makeover by her gold-digging mother (Ane Dahl Torp)—in order to prepare for the prince’s ball, where Elvira may follow in her mom’s seductive footsteps—The Ugly Stepsister gets more and more brutal. It’s looksmaxxing at its most horrific.

There’s a bit of The Substance oozing from the severed extremities and anesthetic-free nosejobs, though its critique of beauty standards isn’t so self-loathing as it is generally furious at a larger social perspective. “Beauty is pain” becomes literally torturous. It’s not that Elvira inherently detests her body, her face, her poise, her status. It’s that her terrible mother and the equally terrible prince have expectations, expectations met without any sewn eyelids or parasitic weight-loss by Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the perfectly pretty Cinderella stand-in. That the snobby Agnes is also sexually experienced, comfortable in her body, makes her a hateable foil as Elvira starts to embody the insecurities of those around her.

Though its visceral punishment of the human body is almost unrelenting (leading, perhaps, to that aforementioned puking), and Myren winningly obliges by nearly always screaming, hurling, or weeping through her scenes, The Ugly Stepsister isn’t Grimmdark. It’s mean, holding nothing back as it disenchants its heroine’s notions about romance and the upper crust, but it’s also a lushly decorated period piece that’s unafraid to burst its own bubble with gross gags, not unlike a juicier, less horny Poor Things. As Disney surely starts to push more Cinderella at us as that 1950 film heads towards its 75th anniversary in February, Blichfeldt’s film offers a R-rated counterpoint better than most “faithful” fairy tale adaptations.

An adaptation completely unconcerned with faithfulness is Dead Lover (C), Grace Glowicki’s goofy lo-fi Frankenstein riff. Director and co-writer Glowicki takes center stage as a loopy, gravedigging buffoon who stinks so badly of corpses that nobody will sleep with her. That is, until a foppish Romantic poet (co-writer Ben Petrie) delights in her fetid odor, seduces her, then kicks the bucket. Time to bring him back, one way or another! Cue the lightning, the rain, the evil lab filled with test tubes and lizards. Everyone’s doing a different silly British accent, especially Glowicki’s marble-mouthed Cockney, as they traverse stark soundstage sets somewhere between Guy Maddin and The Mighty Boosh’s Old Gregg sketches.

For a while, at least, this midnight-movie oddity is charming sheerly through its commitment to its absurd bit. But as the thin resurrection-gone-wrong film wears on, Glowicki’s mugging becomes more grating than funny, and its amusing novelty begins to rot after being unnaturally extended past its normal lifespan. Devotion may persist through death, but Dead Lover starts to drag like the heavy-booted feet of a shambling affront to God.

Some might argue the same is true of By Design (B), the latest film from Amanda Kramer (Please Baby Please) that sees Juliette Lewis swap bodies with a chair. But as that absurd premise unfolds—the chair taking on no new qualities while the body of Lewis’ Camille, now soulless, slumps vegetatively wherever she’s placed—Kramer’s film only gets weirder and weirder. A fascinatingly designed and overtly theatrical daydream that wonders whether the world treats a nice chair better than a human woman (a question with a sadly obvious answer), By Design also taps into the yearning needs of someone who’s allowed life to just happen to them for too long.

Some of the best bits involve Camille’s loved ones holding one-sided conversations with her, which range from completely satirical to strangely moving. (Betty Buckley navigates both with a monologue that has shades of the mom from The Room.) Around the mannered, dryly funny dialogue, interpretive dancers embody emotions never said aloud, while submissive kink imagery makes the desires in the film explicitly sexual. As if a woman-chair needing to be sat on needed to be more explicit. The man doing the sitting (and the sleeping, the dancing, the embracing, and, eventually, the licking) is played by Mamoudou Athie, who gives an “Adam Driver in Megalopolis” performance, where he’s devoted to taking this strange world at face value—reasonable compared to the weirdos, until his own bursts of strangeness emerge.

Around Athie, a mostly motionless Lewis, and the ogled chair, the film’s experimental kitsch is ’80s-inflected, shot in gauzy crossfades, coated in pastels, and suffused with the visual hallmarks of softcore erotica. Added to the stagey artificiality of the film, the aesthetic becomes so distractingly designed that, before you know it, buying into the premise is the least of your worries. She’s a chair now? Fine, fine, but why is that guy tap dancing? If more evidence of By Design’s dedication to its own uncanny vibe was required, Udo Kier shows up wearing some really wild jeans. It’s a pointedly strange experience, sometimes annoyingly so and sometimes unexpectedly crushing, but all enjoyably kooky depending on your tolerance for this kind of thing. It’s also the best “person becomes a chair” film since Suzume, not that there’s a lot of competition.

Seeing one’s true self is the key to The Things You Kill (B+), a heady family drama/crime thriller from Iranian filmmaker Alireza Khatami (Terrestrial Verses). Shot against breathtaking vistas and featuring a large Turkish cast, the slick and cerebral film starts spinning apart when the family’s ailing matriarch dies in the middle of the night. She was old, yes, but her college professor son (Ekin Koç) had also recently learned that his father had been abusive over the course of their marriage. Was her death really just the result of natural causes? And can, or should, anything be done depending on that answer? These questions haunt her son, while the rest of her children would rather quietly move things along. Impotence and violence, two terrifying poles of threatened masculinity, rage throughout The Things You Kill, while its women more readily accept uncomfortable complexities. It’s no surprise when Koç’s character takes his problems to his mysterious gardener (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil) and, together, hatch a scheme.

Shot with a matter-of-fact beauty peppered with a few shocking bursts of style, the less naturalistic parts of The Things You Kill come as a surprise, but the dreamy, sexually tense film is constantly obsessed with the parts of us that we don’t want to acknowledge in the cold light of day. When those parts refuse to stay in the shadows, the film arrests our attention and transforms into something that’s more of a gripping fable than a grounded tale of wills and death certificates. The Things You Kill benefits from going in relatively fresh, so I won’t say much more. Just know that it’s a trip worth taking.