On March 8, Netflix released the fantasy film «Damsel», starring Millie Bobby Brown, the star of Netflix’s «Stranger Things» and «Enola Holmes». In this review, we tell you how the 18-year-old actress, who was still wielding a sword at the time of filming, confronted a fire-breathing dragoness in a dark cave and whether this unequal battle was worth the time spent on it.
Pluses:
another opportunity to admire Millie Bobby Brown for all her fans; a beautifully drawn computer dragon
Minuses:
primitivism, which is manifested in everything - from script efforts and characters to a ridiculous depiction of the battle of the main character with a dragoness
«Damsel»
Genre dark fantasy
Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Starring Millie Bobby Brown, Nick Robinson, Angela Bassett, Robin Wright, Ray Winstone
Premiere Netflix
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb
The young beauty Elodie is forced to accept a marriage of convenience to save her naked, barefoot, and utterly destitute people from certain death. Her father Lord Bayford, stepmother and younger sister Floria arrive in the wealthy and frankly fairytale kingdom for Elodie to marry the local Prince Henry. In return, the king and queen promise Bayford so much gold that he can’t keep up with the demands.
At first, the friendly hosts seem quite nice people, and the prince can even be called a polite and pleasant young man, and the picturesque place here contrasts sharply with the barren wasteland of her native land. But after the wedding ceremony, Elodie is informed of an ancient and strange custom in which she must participate. As a result, the girl, though without pretentious exclamations such as «this is Sparta!!!», is still very unexpectedly thrown into the abyss, where a bloodthirsty fire-breathing dragoness with a tragic past is waiting for her.
From the very beginning, the voiceover proudly announces that this is not another story about a brave knight in iron armor who saves a defenseless doll from a dragon. In fact, even the Ukrainian version of the title, which in the original sounds simply «Damsel», is the direct antithesis of such an archetypal image in art and, in particular, cinema as «damsel distressed». Let’s say no to gender stereotypes! Who doesn’t agree?
Only Millie Bobby Brown destroys these stereotypes by blindly following the examples of masculine action heroes of the past.
She chops firewood in the cold, as if Rocky Balboa in the snowy Soviet wilderness. Barefoot, he makes his way through the narrow passages of caves with a meager light source, like the one John McClane in a ventilation pipe with a lighter. He prepares for the final battle with the monster and smears himself with medicinal mucus (don’t ask), just like Schwarzenegger did with mud in the confrontation with the Predator.
All this could have been quite impressive if it didn’t look so ridiculous. And it’s not that there’s something wrong with the heroine, because there are plenty of strong female characters and of tough warriors The cinema gave us plenty. The point is to realize the idea.
Even critics who unanimously praised the far from outstanding «Enola Holmes» I’ve run out of patience, and here the feminist pathos doesn’t helpful now (at the time of writing, the rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 60% with 93 for Enola Holmes 2).
The real trouble is that the local adventures are so primitive and unpretentious that, even within the genre of conventional fantasy, it looks like a blatantly implausible hack job. In it, a barefoot girl in a shabby dress gives a good kicking to a fire-breathing dragoness who crushes helpless enemies like overripe tomatoes in two seconds. At one point, the cave monster suddenly resorts to T-1000 methods and orders the father to call his daughter, then stabs a sharp claw into the unfortunate old man’s body.
There is no plot or even characterization to speak of. If the filmmakers had been at least a little more inventive or cunning, they could have followed the unobvious path of Jordan Peele and his debut «Get Out» and produced something more extraordinary, mysterious, and exciting. There, if you recall, Daniel Kaluuya’s character also went to visit his soulmate’s crazy family and almost became another victim of a bizarre ritual.
You could come up with something like «Prey» which offered a principled and truly uncompromising confrontation with the adult rating. As a last resort, try to adapt your version of «How to Train Your Dragon», the dramaturgy of which is much better than the local one.
But no dice: neither the director of the zombie horror «28 Weeks Later» Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, nor the co-writer of the «Fast X» Dan Mazeau and Netflix are clearly not targeting a serious audience. They are offering another damn straightforward blockbuster without the slightest bit of imagination, suitable for Friday night entertainment for 12-year-old girls. In short, let’s go, there is no place for old people here.
Millie Bobby Brown is great in the frame and even does a rope climb, but she runs the risk of being stuck in a single role in soulless, glossy films of dubious quality. Robin Wright doesn’t have enough time to be a calculating bitch for the viewer to get any joy from punishing evil. In general, it seems that this is Ray Winstone’s week on Netflix, with a new project coming out for the second day in a row after «The Gentlemen» by Guy Ritchie.
It’s good that contemporary progressive filmmakers are trying to deconstruct established tropes and stale fairy tale images. But this should be done in a more qualitative way than creating primitive and almost plotless one-dayers.
There is no doubt (although there is here) that today’s damsel is able to cope with any misfortune in this unjust world. But all of her efforts will be in vain if the film itself is a complete misfortune.