Damsel review – Glints of treasure in the darkness

Netflix’s Damsel, starring Stranger Things and Enola Holmes’s Millie Bobby Brown, premiered on 8 March – AKA International Women’s Day – for a reason. The film may be an unusual mash-up of the high fantasy and survival thriller genres but it’s also positioned as a tale of female empowerment, with women driving the action. Damsel deliberately subverts fairy tale tropes and does so in a way that doesn’t feel calculated and cringy… for the most part. The film isn’t quite as bold in its execution as concept though.

In Damsel, Brown’s Elodie is introduced as a young noblewoman with a difference. Growing up in a harsh Northern kingdom, she’s hands on and resourceful. That said, she’s still a dutiful daughter, and when her father (Ray Winstone) accepts a proposal for Elodie to marry the prince of a prosperous land, our heroine goes along with it, knowing her dowry will help her struggling people. Things look up when Elodie meets handsome Prince Henry (Nick Robinson), who shares her dreams of travel. Elodie even goes along with a sinister mountainside ceremony following the royal wedding as it’s part of her new home’s culture. Except it’s there that the Elodie’s happy ending unravels, as she learns she is the latest in a long line of princesses to be sacrificed to appease a local dragon.

There’s a lot to appreciate about Damsel. It’s clearly big budget fantasy with spectacular costuming and convincing CGI. With 28 Weeks Later’s Juan Carlos Fresnadillo behind the camera, Damsel is arguably the most visually striking filmic fairy tale since Snow White and the Huntsman. One scene, involving a flock of birds in a cavern, is both stunning and harrowing. It also provides a good sense of Damsel’s unusually dark tone, although that commitment to intensity does waver, which will be discussed in a second.

The film offers other pleasures too, like two veteran performers playing against type. Angela Bassett, who will probably be best associated with Black Panther’s no-nonsense Queen Ramonda is much softer than usual here, playing Elodie’s overbearing but good-hearted stepmother Lady Bayford. Meanwhile, Robin Wright, who portrayed one of cinema’s most iconic damsels in distress in The Princess Bride, turns that sunny likeability completely on its head as Queen Isabelle, an icy monarch who has no qualms about orchestrating the deaths of girls she feels beneath her family.

It’s clever casting, if a bit on the nose, and that is Damsel’s biggest flaw: its obviousness. It may be beautifully shot, and well-acted, but narratively its sharpness is blunted by conveniences and an apparent desire to be more digestible, and ultimately audience friendly. So instead of having Elodie struggling with injuries and burns (novelly, Damsel’s dragon spews larva) for the entire movie, she just so happens to find something that heals her so she can face her enemy at full, pristine skinned strength.

Shohreh Aghdashloo, as the voice of the dragon, is brilliant casting, but at the same time, Damsel would have been an entirely different, artistically elevated beast if the filmmakers had gone a similar route to last year’s nearly silent No One Will Save You – where Kaitlyn Dever had to use her wits against alien invaders. The challenge would have been telling Elodie and the dragon’s struggle, as well as the latter’s backstory, without words. As it stands, while lost in the caves, Elodie prattles on like a AAA video game protagonist. The apparent fear of imposing quiet is matched by a resistance to really pushing Elodie’s limits and the film’s creative ambitions.

Despite flashes of something more flavoursome, and multiple ingredients that stand out, Damsel ends up lacking flavour. It’s watchable but doesn’t achieve its full trope-bending potential.

Damsel is on Netlflix now, having joined the streaming service on 8 March.