Director – Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Screenplay – Dan Mazeau, Producers – Chris Castaldi, Jeff Kirschenbaum & Joe Roth, Photography – Larry Fong, Music – David Fleming, Visual Effects Supervisors – Nicholas Brooks & Nigel Denton-Howes, Visual Effects – Important Looking Pirates (Supervisor – Andrej Blom, Daniel Jahnel, Sam Lucas, Peter Marin & David Wahlberg), NetFX, Nvis, One of Us (Supervisors – Lars Andersen, Bodie Clare, Jacopo Landi & Emmanuel Pichereau), Pixomondo (Supervisor – Max Riess), Primary VFX, Rodeo FX (Supervisor – Mathieu Dupuis) & The Yard, Special Effects Supervisor – Stefano Pepin, Production Design/Dragon Design – Patrick Tatopoulos. Production Company – RK Films.
Cast
Millie Bobby Brown (Elodie), Ray Winstone (King Bayford), Angela Bassett (Lady Bayford), Robin Wright (Queen Isabelle), Nick Robinson (Prince Henry), Brooke Carter (Floria), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Voice of the Dragon), Milo Twomey (King Roderick), Patrice Naiambana (Chamberlain)
Plot
The princess Elodie is told by her father King Bayford that she is to be married to Prince Henry of the kingdom of Aurel. She is urged to accept this as a good thing as the dowry will substantially revitalise their impoverished kingdom. They travel to Aurel where Elodie meets Henry and undergoes the marriage ceremony. Immediately after, Henry takes her for a ride up to a mountainside cave and pushes her into a pit that is inhabited by a dragon. This is part of an agreement that Aurel has made with the dragon that they will sacrifice their royal brides to it in return for the kingdom being spared. In the pit, Elodie does everything she can to survive and find a way to freedom.
The Dragon fantasy has been with us since at least the silent era and Siegfried (1924) all the way through The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) and DragonHeart (1996) to the more recent likes of tv’s Game of Thrones (2011-9) and The Hobbit films, among others. The work that Damsel most resembles in this regard is the underrated Disney film Dragonslayer (1981), which has a number of similarities in its focus on the virgins sacrificed by the people of a kingdom to appease the dragon and in the story of the novice venturing into the dragon’s lair.
The spin that Damsel tries to offer on these is an appeal to the 2020s Girl Power and women positive films. From the opening credits and its very choice of title, the film announces that it is inverting the usual gender clichés of the dragon fantasy in that the girl is not the helpless damsel who needs rescuing but the one that tackles the dragon herself. That said, the film never quite offers the reversal of genders it promises here – it is more her surviving the dragon, although the latter half has Millie Bobby Brown return to the cavern to rescue another damsel in distress – her sister.
Damsel comes from Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo who made an impressive debut with Intacto (2001) about a secret underground that dealt with people gambling on other’s luck quotients. This was sufficient to have Fresnadillo brought to England to make 28 Weeks Later (2007) and for a time Fresnadillo was associated with a number of other high-profile remakes that never emerged, before he returned to Spain to make Intruders (2011) about a childhood boogeyman and to produce the cryptic dream tv series Falling Water (2016-8). Damsel is the first film he has directed in thirteen years. The script comes from Dan Manzeau, whose only two previous screenplays were for Wrath of the Titans (2012) and Fast X (2023).
Within moments of opening, Damsel causes you to switch off altogether. In its mediaeval Fantasy Otherworld setting, characters spout grating modern colloquialisms like reference to Girl Talk. Or worse are their voicing modern attitudes – Millie Bobby Brown should not be questioning whether it is right to be married for money, let along being ‘guilted into marriage’ (another modernism) – it is a duty that would have been taught to her for birth. In the opening scenes, we see the peasantry fleeing the countryside, which would have been impossible under a feudal system – they would have been indentured to their land and there would literally be nowhere for them to go. The other grating thing comes every time the name of the kingdom they are travelling to is mentioned, it sounds like people are saying “Welcome to the Kingdom of Oreo,” which keeps puncturing the suspension of disbelief to anyone familiar with North American cookies.
Millie Bobby Brown as Elodie in the dragon’s lair
What Damsel feels like is a fantasy film made for people who don’t like fantasy films. “A ground-breaking Netflix original that redefines the fantasy genre,” says Neon Music with absurd hyperbole to the extent you wonder if the writers have actually watched or read any fantasy before. There is no redefining so much as an anodysing of the genre, but with a Girl Power spin.
It feels as though the entire story might have served as the arc for one of the characters in Game of Thrones, but where this has been run through the formula of a Disney tv movie. In this regard, there is the heroine who finds her own strength and stands up for justice, even challenges royal rule; an appropriate amount of representation; and where anything like reality of the land or politics of the kingdom beyond what is required to set up the premise has been airbrushed out. (For instance, I kept wondering exactly how many neighbouring kingdoms there must be to keep providing princesses and thinking that surely the rate of marriages that Aurel churns through would gain them a bad reputation with neighbours or else drain the royal coffers in a hurry).
I started to like Damsel more during its latter half and the scenes with Millie Bobby Brown going up against the dragon – some decent effects scenes here. Her efforts to escape the cave are far too drawn out, but the film does come together passably towards the end. Fresnadillo does direct these scenes with more grit than usual and we do get to see several people killed, while the ending goes satisfyingly against grain. It still doesn’t make Damsel anything more than a formulaic fantasy film.
Damsel is produced by its lead actress Millie Bobby Brown and her father Robert, who is better known as a producer on assorted Gordon Ramsey tv shows! Millie came to fame as Eleven in tv’s Stranger Things (2016- ), which had her twice nominated for an Emmy Award. This has had her slotted into a variety of other roles in particular in Godzilla, King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs Kong (2021), as well as the moderate success of the Enola Holmes tv movies. Damsel offers Brown nothing other than a part that could have been filled by any actress. (Not to mention, she is stuck with a makeup job that makes her face look like polished wood). It is the disappointing case of someone who comes to fame in a distinctive role who continues to try to justify their name by taking on a series of parts that turn her into no more than another generic Hollywood starlet as opposed to ones that demonstrate a diverse acting range hence means that she has a future ahead of her beyond the limited shelf-life of being remembered as just “the girl from Stranger Things.”
