“Steps” Review: A Smooth Cinderella Reboot With Little Subversion

By Tom Whitfield

“Steps” streams on Netflix beginning Friday, November 20, and the review calls it little more than disposable corporate entertainment.

The film belongs to a familiar line of revisionist fairy tales. The review traces the pattern to “Wicked” and later origin stories for Maleficent and Cruella de Vil. It places the unnamed Norwegian body-horror movie in a separate, more ambitious category. Its larger complaint is that reversing a familiar villain no longer earns credit for originality.

The review’s audience judgment is severe: anyone whose age contains multiple digits has little reason to seek out “Steps” except to entertain their own children. Children too young to recognize the tropes may find it entertaining or moving. The suggested viewing cycle runs from “Cinderella” to “Steps,” then onward to stories with more to say.

What does the retelling change for Cinderella?

It recasts Cinderella, the wish-fulfillment heroine, as the object of another girl’s resentment. The review argues that “Cinderella” offers less emotional depth than “Beauty and the Beast” or “The Little Mermaid,” making this a plausible story to reverse. The reversal also supplies a practical social test: can the supposed heroine recognize her own bias?

That test initially fails. The film begins with a stereotyped voice-over narrator reading from an old storybook about Cinderella’s mistreatment. Ali Wong’s Lilith slides into the frame, says “Whoa whoa whoa” and calls the tale “character assassination.”

The credits:

• Alyce Tzue and John Ripa directed “Steps.”
• Ava Tramer, James Madejski, Jen Chuck, Dana Schwartz and Felicia Ho wrote the screenplay.
• Kate Micucci has the story credit.

The story recasts the wicked stepmother as an Asian dressmaker whose work moves her daughters around. Her marriage brings Lilith, Margot and the dressmaker to the kingdom of Alouette, where they seek stability. The review says all three see the move as a chance for security, while Lilith and Margot look forward to spending time with their new stepsister, Amanda Seyfried’s Cinderella.

Their initial friendship exposes a different kind of cruelty. According to the review, the initial villain is not Cinderella but the all-Caucasian kingdom where she lives. The blended family shares cultural traditions, but Lilith and Margot encounter exclusion. Nikki Glazer’s mean girl Priscilla freezes them out at school, and Cinderella fails to defend them. The resulting rivalry turns on mutual assumptions: Cinderella thinks Lilith is mean, while Lilith thinks Cinderella is dumb and ditzy.

Lilith’s response fits the film’s account of adolescence. She wants to reject the hierarchy that excludes her, yet she still measures herself by it. The review says she is more interested in destroying what she hates than discovering what she likes. She steals a magic wand from Bette Midler’s Fairy Godmother and sabotages the royal ball.

That sabotage complicates matters for Daniel Radcliffe’s Prince and sends the kingdom into free-fall. Lilith and the stepsister she loathes then travel through the forest to set things right. The premise gives younger viewers a clear conflict, but the execution remains smooth rather than surprising.

The review describes the animation as unpleasantly slick and the storytelling as picture-perfect. It credits the film for showing that Cinderella and Lilith each learn something about the other. Yet it finds the result too polished around the edges to resonate with adults. The film is well-meaning and sufficiently competent to avoid offence, but not memorable enough to surprise.

There is one sustained area of emotional credibility. The early scenes treat bullying and the inflated importance children assign to exclusion with some pathos, and the review says the film handles those passages well. Nothing in the story, however, overcomes what the review calls a tired formula stripped of subversion.

Villain-led revisions began by challenging the flatness of fairy tales and their “Happily Ever After” endings. The review argues that the formula now replaces those simplistic conclusions with endings of its own that are equally superficial. The point about outsiders has real force; the execution does not.

For a Netflix viewer deciding whether this is worth a family watch, the answer depends on the child, not the adults. Netflix’s release can widen who recognizes “Cinderella,” but the review finds little evidence that it widens what the fairy tale has to say.