Taking age-old expectations of how a fairytale is meant to play out and giving them a brisk shuffle is not at all as contemporary as some film-makers typically prefer to assume, upending cliches with a drained wink and a smug smirk. However Netflix’s Damsel, itself loosely much like Hulu’s 2022 providing The Princess, doesn’t require our astonishment at its wheel reinvention to cross the bar and is much too sprightly to get overly slowed down within the self-satisfaction of such an endeavour.
There are, in actual fact, only a few surprises in retailer right here – maybe Quick X author Mazeau’s script may have benefitted from just a few – however there’s a easy, mechanical satisfaction to watching an underdog struggle her means again from the depths, pushed by a well-recognized present of revenge. For Elodie (Netflix’s in-house main woman Millie Bobby Brown), her journey begins in a distinct type of strife. Her household, led by father (Ray Winstone) and stepmother (Angela Bassett) are struggling and so are her folks, in want of a miracle to avoid wasting them. It magically arrives as a proposal of marriage, a good-looking prince from a far-off kingdom (Nick Robinson) needs to make her his spouse, steered by a strong-willed queen (Robin Wright). However her blissful ending is in actual fact an sad starting, the marriage a part of an historic ritual that sees her hurled right into a cave, sacrificed to a dragon. Romance curdles into horror as Elodie should scramble again to security.
It’s a tweenage riff on a traditional left-for-dead revenge story and in a subgenre that has been performed to exhaustion, watching a younger girl endure this identical bodily gruelling rise-to-action-hero standing does really feel at the very least superficially brisker (compared to one other bride-finds-out-wedding-is-sacrifice thriller, it’s far more practical than 2019’s Prepared or Not, a movie far too happy with itself to care if we’re as entertained).
Within the arms of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, a Spanish style director who has been absent from Hollywood for a very good whereas (the response to his 2011 Clive Owen horror Intruders was unhealthy sufficient to maintain him away), Damsel is an involving journey of low-level pleasures as we watch Elodie uncover the significance of her personal resourcefulness and an unbiased drive over the love of a prince. It’s a gently feminist spin with the queen additionally main the dominion, Elodie’s stepmother taking management of the household and even a feminine dragon ruling the cave. It permits for 3 older feminine actors to take time and area in a movie of this scale, gifting us with an successfully icy to-type but underused Wright (in want of some extra ferocious one-liners) and splendidly sinister voice work from Oscar nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo. Like many baby actors, Brown generally is a little over-emphatic in her line supply and emotional reactions, one thing that almost labored within the Enola Holmes films, however one thing that may really feel somewhat too self-aware and synthetic at instances, the form of precociousness that’s spectacular within the youthful years but much less so with age. A movie like Damsel doesn’t precisely require a perfrormance that’s grounded or gritty nevertheless it’s solely when the function depends on her to flip from phrases to motion that she comes into her personal.
Whereas a few of the wider landscapes can really feel somewhat AI-bolstered, Damsel avoids rather a lot, if not all, of the visible tells that may remind us we’re watching a Netflix mockbuster quite than an actual blockbuster. The world is immersive if somewhat untapped, the dragon strikes with extra aptitude and ease than CG monsters in these movies typically do and whereas the dankness of the cave setting can get somewhat monotonous, together with a few of the story beats close to the top, it’s mercifully well-lit.
If Damsel doesn’t precisely rewrite the storybook, it makes for a reliable rework of it, a rousing revenge saga that gives a skinny but encouraging message for its youthful feminine viewers and a balm for these older viewers who grew up being spoon-fed the identical previous gendered cliches. This time, there’s some salt to go together with that sugar.
