Damsel

Millie Bobby Brown squares off against a bloodthirsty dragon in an intense, very violent fantasy for much older children.

Girl power: Millie Bobby Brown

“There are many stories of chivalry where the heroic knight saves the damsel in distress. This is not one of them,” announces Millie Bobby Brown in her best-positioned English vowels. She is Elodie, the practical, strong-willed daughter of Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone), whose people are both starving and freezing to death. While Elodie had hoped to find a husband of her own choosing, her father has set up an arranged marriage so as to finance the survival of his realm. Times be hard, and Elodie just hopes that her imminent spouse is at least a kind man, and a well-read one. So, she, her father, stepmother (Angela Bassett) and younger sister Floria (Brooke Carter) set off for the affluent island of Aurea, to meet her new beau, Prince Henry (Nick Robinson).

For anybody who has followed the career of Millie Bobby Brown, the darling of Netflix, they will know that she has come up against her fair share of monsters. Be it her starring role in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), or her struggle with the various leviathans in Netflix’s own Stranger Things, she has served her apprenticeship. Here, for much of Damsel she is pitted against a talkative dragon with a ferocious temper, who just kills for the sake of killing, whether squishing her victims with her giant talons or just incinerating them with her breath. And yes, she’s a she (there are echoes of Alien throughout), voiced by the Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, in keeping with the strong feminist bent of this post-modern fairytale for much older children. Even the king of Aurea (Milo Twomey) barely gets a word in, with the bulk of the dialogue going to his queen, Robin Wright (once a princess bride herself, in the 1987 film of the same name). It is no surprise, then, that the twenty-year-old Ms Brown secures an executive producer credit, while she actually produced Enola Holmes and Enola Homes 2 for Netflix. Again, she was a female incarnation of a popular male figure in fiction, playing the younger sister of Sherlock Holmes.

As to be expected from a Netflix title, the CGI-heavy production here is a handsome one, largely filmed on the Iberian Peninsula, where its star was born. OK, so Millie Bobby was born in Marbella, while the majority of the exteriors here were shot in Portugal, but the statement holds. The scenery is spectacular, befitting a tale of princesses and dragons, but any modernist approach with a wink and a nod is brushed aside for a more brutal tone. This dragon is a real piece of work and the sequences with Elodie are genuinely unnerving. The Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) injects a bracing note of realism into scenes we have become familiar with from so many cartoons. But when Elodie is cowering in a tunnel and the dragon snorts a plume of flame down it, Elodie’s flesh really burns, suppurates and she really screams in genuine pain. At times, Damsel recalls the agony of James Franco in  127 Hours, directed by Danny Boyle (28 Days Later), where there seems no escape from such cavernous perils. So once again Millie Bobby Brown proves to be a heroine for our times, and the element of horror is every bit as tense as it is in Stranger Things, albeit without the restorative humour.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Ray Winstone, Nick Robinson, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Angela Bassett, Robin Wright, Brooke Carter, Milo Twomey, Nicole Joseph. 

Dir Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Pro Joe Roth, Jeff Kirschenbaum and Chris Castaldi, Ex Pro Millie Bobby Brown, Screenplay Dan Mazeau, Ph Larry Fong, Pro Des Patrick Tatopoulos, Ed John Gilbert, Music David Fleming, Costumes Amanda Monk, Sound Glenn Freemantle and Ben Barker. 

Roth/Kirschenbaum Films-Netflix.
109 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 8 March 2024. Cert. 12

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