Damsel (2024) | REVIEW

Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo — Screenplay by Dan Mazeau.

28 Weeks Later-director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s Damsel is a fantasy film that follows a teenage girl named Elodie (played by Millie Bobby Brown) as she is urged by her father Lord Bayford (played by Ray Winstone) to accept a royal proposal to marry Prince Henry (played by Nick Robinson), the son of Queen Isabelle of Aurea (played by Robin Wright). Although there is initially no spark between the prince and our heroine, whose people need the wealth her marriage would afford them, they warm to each other once they get to know each other. But as the tagline on the poster would have you know, this is no fairytale. After the wedding, Elodie and her new husband Prince Henry are taken out to the mountains where they must take part in an ancient ritual, which reveals the true intentions of the royal family.

You see, inside the mountains, a dragon (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo) is waiting for a sacrifice. Years ago, an event occurred that forced the King into perenially sacrificing three daughters to the dragon to ensure peace between the kingdom and the dragon. To deceive the dragon into thinking it is routinely being given royal daughters, the royals have again and again lured young women into marriage only to cut their hands, blend their blood with royal blood, and then chuck them into a deep, dark cave to keep their side of the agreement with the dragon. And, now, Elodie is the next young woman to be sacrificed, which she only truly realizes once Prince Henry throws her off a bridge and into the dragon’s lair. Now hunted by a dragon, Elodie must try to make it out alive.

Equal parts Game of Thrones, Radio Silence’s Ready Or Not, and Roar Uthaug’s Tomb Raider, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s Damsel — penned by Fast X co-writer Dan Mazeau —  feels like it was designed specifically to function as a star vehicle for Millie Bobby Brown. She gets nice, semi-romantic scenes with Nick Robinson in the style of Bridgerton, claustrophobic action like she’s Lara Croft, one-on-one dragon scenes, a narrative about rising up against the privileged like she’s Daenerys Targaryen, and a feminist revenge genre narrative built around a cruel family and their cruel ritualistic secrets. It all sounds great, but, in execution, it is often bland, inert, and stays too long in the caves for the revenge narrative to have the sufficient time and oomph that it needs to be fully satisfying. Just as jokes don’t do well when explained, describing memes rather than viewing them isn’t the ideal way to deliver said memes, but given that this is a written review please excuse me as I reference a modern meme template that I’ve been thinking about ever since I first saw this film. I imagine Millie Bobby Brown telling Netflix that she wants to be in Game of Thrones and Netflix responding that she can have Game of Thrones ‘at home’ with them — with Damsel being Netflix’s idea of Game of Thrones at home.

Now, Damsel does have many of the right ingredients to be a Game of Thrones-esque narrative. It’s got dragons, family secrets, bloody weddings, a woman rising up against those in power, and then a pretty solid cast of supporting actors like Robinson, Winstone, Wright, and Angela Bassett. But despite those right ingredients, it doesn’t add up to the same feeling. This is due to many different issues. The dialogue is cliched and generic, there are many subpar green-screened backgrounds, so many of the supporting characters are frustratingly thinly written, the structure leaves too little room for the payoff, the cave scenes featuring a tête-à-tête with the dragon eventually drag, the narrative wastes its supporting cast (with Bassett and Robinson feeling particularly hard done by), and, frankly, it doesn’t help that you can always tell when they’ve put lip-gloss on Millie Bobby Brown’s lips — the make-up is frankly jarring. In addition to this, there are nitpicks like how (and when) she makes sounds or even screams while hiding from the dragon.

I also don’t think it is as original as it thinks it is. It wants to be this great one-of-a-kind feminist fantasy coming-of-age action film, but it often reminded me of the Joey King-led The Princess from director Le-Van Kiet, which came out in 2022. Its use of Ready Or Not-esque ritualistic family secrets is its most interesting aspect, but it was ruined by the trailers. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s Damsel does have some redeeming qualities: it features solid fantasy costumes, decent production design, there is a fantasy worm creature that doubles as a light source and, essentially, a health potion that I thought was really cool, Millie Bobby Brown does deliver a solid performance all things considered, Shohreh Aghdashloo’s voice performance as the oft-mentioned dragon is exceptional, and the dragon itself is well-realized using visual effects. But, ultimately, while it makes for a relatively decent star vehicle for Millie Bobby Brown, this film, which is built around a jarringly lip-glossed-up fantasy heroine, is not riveting or original enough to overcome its issues. 

4.5 out of 10

– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.