DAMSEL (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Damsel, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 8, 2024

Offering a wicked and horror-infused twist on a fairy tale, Damsel is only undone by some repetitive plotting and visual effects that aren't up to the task at hand. It might be easy film criticism to say a movie doesn't succeed because of underwhelming visual effects, but that seems essential when one of the main characters of a story is a talking, fire-breathing dragon with a tragic history who's as important as the major human characters.

That dragon figures into the story's prologue, which has a king and his most loyal soldiers traveling across the plains to a towering, imposing mountain in the distance. All of this is likely the work of a good number of visual effects artists, too, as the camera sweeps over and follows the charge in a fantastical realm that almost benefits from a lack of pure realism. As soon as the monarch and his knights arrive in the cave, though, any sense of unreal romanticism flees the scene.

This dragon means business. That means unleashing a magma-like breath upon the soldiers closet to its hiding place, engulfing the knights in flames and making them howl in agony. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has at least some background in horror, and almost immediately, the filmmaker hits home that his and screenwriter Dan Mazeau's riff on the fairy tale format isn't going to be for the audience one mostly associates with such pleasant fare.

Indeed, a wedding is typically the reward for a protagonist in such a tale, after enduring multiple challenges and surviving many adventures, but in this case, it's the first thing of note that happens. Centuries later, Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown), the elder daughter of Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone), lives in a far-away land that's suffering from poverty. If something doesn't happen or change, it's likely the entire population will die during a harsh winter.

Then, a letter arrives from the kingdom of the prologue. It contains a marriage proposal and a promise of great wealth for Bayford's lands in return. Elodie isn't thrilled with the idea of being the center of a financial exchange for her hand in marriage, but her father, stepmother Lady Bayford (Angela Bassett), and younger sister Floria (Brooke Carter) are quite convincing.

The wedding seems to go off fine. Elodie's new husband Prince Henry (Nick Robinson) is quiet and kindly, listening to her concerns and sharing a dream of one day traveling to see what the world has to offer. The only hitch, perhaps, is Elodie's new mother-in-law Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright), who forgets the name of her son's bride-to-be and treats her stepmother with a dismissive attitude that doesn't seem as welcoming as the two families' first meeting.

Yes, something's amiss, and that something is this family's ancestors made a deal with the dragon all those centuries ago. If not for the fact that the whole plot revolves around this revelation, it's a shame that it can't be kept a secret, because the build-up to it, with a ceremony of masked figures, is the right kind of eerie.

Here it is, though: The beast requires, not one or two, but three sacrifices of young women of each successive generation. The royal family has married their sons to young women from around world to avoid any cost to its bloodline, and Elodie is the most recent sacrifice.

A story of survival ensues, as Elodie has to find her way around the dragon's cave, avoid its notice and definitely its fiery breath, and use whatever resources—either left behind by those knights and former sacrifices or, in the case of a rather handy bosom separator, found on her elaborate wedding gown—are available to try to escape. The resulting story contains a lot of close-calls (perhaps a few too many for Elodie's bad luck), a couple effective jump-scares (Timing is everything, but the element of genuine surprise is a close second), and some suspense from the layout and non-dragon inhabitants of the cave itself, such as when a collection of icicles starts melting faster or when one suffering bird is nothing compared to an entire flock of the flying, flaming creatures.

There's still the matter and issue of the dragon with which to deal. In theory, the fell beast is a terrifying entity, voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo with an unsettling combination of softness and threat that reverberates through the caverns. When the dragon is in shadow and can only be made out by the glowing flame rising in its throat, the creature is intimidating. As we start to get a clearer view both of it and its motivation, though, the movie starts to struggle under the weight of a digital creature that isn't nearly as believable or menacing as Aghdashloo's vocal work.

Mazeau also runs out of creative challenges and inventive workarounds for Elodie's predicament pretty quickly, meaning that Damsel starts to feel repetitive before it actually does become so. It ultimately sends our protagonist through the same steps and past the same obstacles for a final showdown that contrives a few cheap ways to pull off two contradictory goals—a final battle with the apparent villain and one with the actual ones. The core idea here is clever, while the flashes of fantasy horror and Brown's determined performance give the material a boost, but the movie doesn't quite pull of the neat trick it wants to perform.

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