The Spool / Festivals
Sundance 2025: The Ugly Stepsister, Coexistence My Ass!, Cutting Through Rocks
Three tales of women struggling against societal pressures haunt our first dispatch from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

It’s a somber year for Sundance, by all accounts: Attitude on the streets of Park City, Utah is downbeat, and it’s easy to understand why. The first week or so of Trump 2.0 has set about a host of baffling executive orders, crackdowns on seemingly any government operations people could consider left of Stalin, and trade wars and AI continue to loom over our heads. What’s more, this is one of Sundance’s last years in Park City, so the feeling is that of picking up stakes and moving to greener pastures. Still, the films will out, and despite a relative lack of huge standouts that have burst from the festival as with previous years, there are still quite a few diamonds we can extract from the rough—particularly in this tryptich of three women either succumbing to, or fighting against, the cruel worlds that subjugate them.

One of them, a delight for folk horror hounds, is the Shudder-bound The Ugly Stepsister, the feature debut of Emilie Blichfeldt, a twisted take on the Cinderella fable that throws back to its Grimm-er roots. Rather than the tale of a naturally beautiful woman, inside and out, finding her purpose among jealous uggos, Blichfeldt’s work shifts its focus to the ugly stepsister who’s just trying to find a way to build up some currency in a cruel fairy-tale world where appearances are everything. And the ways in which she goes about it are gruesome enough to make even the most ardent horror hounds wince. I know I did, several times.

Kicking off with a hazy, film-shot look that fits somewhere between Donkey Skin and The Wicker Man, The Ugly Stepsister centers its cruel yet sympathetic gaze on Elvira (Lea Myren), the moon-faced daughter of social climbing widow Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), daydreaming of her own prince charming while traveling so Rebekka can marry her new beau. When the new groom unexpectedly croaks, they all learn far too late that neither party was as wealthy as the other thought; they’re right back where they started, with a new stepsister, the beautiful Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) aka Cinderella, now in tow. But another chance comes when the prince announces a ball three months hence, inviting all the virgin girls in the land so he can choose one to marry. Naturally, Rebekka begins styling Elvira to give herself the best shot possible—a move that requires some decidedly stomach-churning sacrifices.

Comparisons to The Substance abound, of course, as Blichfeldt’s self-described “beauty horror” mines its terror not from external forces, but the self-imposed beauty standards Elvira destroys herself trying to attain. Marcel Zyskind’s honeyed, ’70s-inspired cinematography refuses to look away at each of the family’s violent attempts to remake and reshape its protagonist: breaking her nose to give it a more pleasing shape, stitching eyelash extensions on her, and let’s not even talk about the tapeworm. There’s a darkly humorous strain of cruelty to the proceedings—how could there not be, considering the fairy tale’s pedigree?—but Blichfeldt finds a curious strain of sympathy for this young woman.

Elvira’s efforts aren’t the product of a black soul, but of a pragmatic world where beauty equals status, and a recognition that the way she looks just isn’t good enough to let her and her family thrive. Body horror in the truest sense, as we watch a woman destroy herself for the heartless whims of a world that just doesn’t accept her in the shape in which she was born. And crucially, with each excruciating close-up of the gnarliness Elvira experiences, Blichfeldt refuses to let us look away.

Sundance Coexistence My Ass! Review
Noam Shuster Eliassi appears in Coexistence, My Ass! by Amber Fares, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Where The Ugly Stepsister offers gnarly folk horror about a woman crunched into dust by fantastical patriarchy, Coexistence My Ass! offers a bit more hope amidst real-life atrocity. Amber Fares’ droll yet somber bio-doc about activist turned comedian Noam Shuster Eliassi is really a two-in-one: the film’s title is drawn from Eliassi’s one-woman comedy show, an observational piece describing her thorny position as a radical leftist Jew advocating for a free Palestine, and cuts between her performing that show in a black-box theater to cutaways exploring her life and activism. The results are infectious and admirable, if a little helter-skelter.

As a subject, Eliassi is a breath of fresh air, a remarkably self-confident and driven woman dedicated to peace through any means necessary, even (and especially) laughter. After a stint as the first Jewish woman to play the Palestinian Comedy Festival, Harvard invites her to develop the one-woman show that would become “Coexistence, My Ass!” She accepts the challenge with no small amount of irreverence: The doc opens with her complaining that the boot of the John Harvard statue on campus, which people travel everywhere to touch or kiss, is “the dirtiest place in America.” Eliassi’s comic style is self-effacing but gentle, as we see her workshop jokes about body hair and her dating life to broader, more Hannah Gadsby-esque social observations on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Amongst the rubble and the violence, Eliassi strives to find light in the darkness, and her refusal to back down is admirable. We see her leading protests for Palestinian liberation in Israel, making one appearance after another on Israeli TV, and even making provocative parody songs about how Muslims in Dubai happily ignore the atrocities visited upon their brethren in Gaza. Through Fares’ camera, we see where this dogged sense of justice comes from: Not only her family members, who raised her in a planned community testbed for Israeli/Palestinian coexistence called Nova Shalom, but the disappointing indifference her fellow Jews have towards the escalating settler violence in Gaza. The doc begins in 2019, where the conflict is already at a fever pitch: the twin specters of COVID and October 7th, and the ensuing genocide that followed, loom over Eliassi and the film itself.

But the fact that Eliassi turns those tragedies into moments of action is deeply admirable: While recovering from the virus, she saw Israelis and Palestinians living in peace in a quarantined hotel jokingly dubbed “Hotel Corona.” She refuses to back down when her fellow Israelis call her a traitor, or don’t square the dissonance of caring about preserving their own democracy while depriving Gazans of the same. These moments, admittedly, offer more concrete impact than the cutaways to her one-woman show; this is a doc that feels more successful in its activism than its comedy. But Eliassi’s approach at least gives her the opportunity to attack the question of peace from a lighter angle than most, which prevents Coexistence My Ass! from wallowing in misery. And that’s sorely needed.

Sundance Cutting Through Rocks
Sara Shahverdi appears in Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار) by Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Mohammad Reza Eyni.

A more somber, though no less inspiring, tale of women making a difference in the vast morass of Middle Eastern politics is Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni’s Cutting Through Rocks. Filmed over years, the doc hones in on the life and activism of Sara Shahverdi, an Iranian ex-midwife who, in the opening minutes, has just learned she’s been elected the first female councilwoman in her small village. It’s a moment of elation; young girls throughout the village are enamored of her, with her penchant for motorcycle joyriding and her refusal to wear more restrictive clothing typical of devout Muslim women. (Even some of the village’s men excitedly ride past her and gush about how they’re voting for her; she, indeed, wins the most votes for city council by far.)

But Khaki and Eyni waste no time setting forth the gargantuan challenges she faces enacting change amidst a deeply patriarchal society filled with laziness and gridlock. First off, her taciturn younger brother, one of three, has been elected to the council alongside her, and is more than willing to dismiss her opinion on everything from fairly distributing shares of their family’s land to her and her six sisters to the shape of a public park. Secondly, her status as a role model for the women in their village makes her a target for all the other older men in the village, who dismiss her as a troublemaker at best and a secret man at worst. It’s a village deeply entrenched in traditions of child marriages and total male control over financial freedom, both principles Shahverdi hopes to combat.

Khaki and Eyni take a wistful, verite approach to the material, and wisely so, since it allows us to sit there with Shahverdi as she endures one indignity after another. She’s a firebrand, and a watchable one: She refuses to back down at every argument from her brother, even (or perhaps especially) as her fellow brothers urge her to just go along to get along. But that’s not Shahverdi’s speed: she’s got too many young women begging her to take them on motorcycle rides or appear at their school, or (in the case of one poor soul) a twelve-year-old girl who’s already married and contemplating a divorce from her abusive husband. In all of these contexts, Khaki and Eyni observe Shahverdi’s struggles with remarkable humanity; she’s a warrior for the women and girls of her village, and the weight that places on her is immense.

But what enlivens about Cutting Through Rocks is Shahverdi’s irrepressible tenacity; no matter what life or the men in her village throw at her, she remains steadfast. Eyni, who pulls double duty as cinematographer, frames Shahverdi in dogged close-ups at her angriest moments, contrasted with beautiful wides as she putters through the barren streets of her village or the nearby mountains on her motorcycle. These moments of serenity seem to fuel her, and the women who follow her. And, in Cutting Through Rocks, demonstrate the resilience these women have in trying to change a culture so allergic to their agency.