Damsel (2024)
Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Screenwriter: Dan Mazeau
Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Ray Winstone, Nick Robinson, Brooke Carter, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Angela Bassett, Robin Wright
Damsels in distress have long been a staple of storytelling, from ancient myths to classic cinema. Over time creators have both reinforced and subverted that archetype, producing iconic examples and memorable flips on the trope — female characters who defy passive roles and assert agency. That history makes it difficult to call Netflix’s fantasy film Damsel revolutionary; instead, the film often feels like it mistakes obvious catchphrases for insight. The idea of a heroine saving herself is well established, and this movie rarely deepens or complicates that premise in a satisfying way.
The film opens with an earnest voiceover from Millie Bobby Brown’s Elodie, announcing that she’s “not like other girls.” Elodie is the teenage daughter of a lord in an unnamed, struggling kingdom. When Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright) of the prosperous realm of Aurea proposes a marriage between Elodie and her son, Prince Henry (Nick Robinson), Elodie and her family travel to the distant court hoping for security. What appears to be a political marriage soon reveals a darker purpose: Elodie is not a bride but a ritual sacrifice to a dragon that demands royal blood in exchange for the kingdom’s prosperity. Thrust into the caverns where the dragon dwells, Elodie must fight to survive and to understand the bargain that dooms her line.
Damsel’s most glaring weakness is its script. The film builds a visually generic fantasy world—kings, castles, and sweeping landscapes—without giving the audience a clear sense of its societies, rules, or stakes. Aside from a few aesthetic shots of green fields and snowy hills, worldbuilding is minimal. Characters’ backgrounds and community dynamics are sketched at best; we are told Elodie’s people are poor, but we are not shown how that shapes their lives, governance, or culture. Costuming, while competent, largely reads as generic medieval attire and offers little insight into status or personality, making characters who should look distinct appear interchangeable.
Performances vary. Millie Bobby Brown is convincing in moments of physical vulnerability—when she is dirty, terrified, and struggling to survive—but Elodie’s interior life is underwritten. The film rarely gives her consistent motivations or desires to anchor her choices; she alternates between displays of quiet strength and unexplained compliance, which undercuts any emotional payoff. Nick Robinson’s Prince Henry feels peripheral and poorly defined, serving mainly as a plot device to lure victims rather than a fully realized character. Ray Winstone, Robin Wright, and Angela Bassett bring gravitas to small roles, but the material rarely gives them enough to work with. The one striking vocal performance comes from Shohreh Aghdashloo as the dragon; her voice lends presence and menace, making the creature feel more tangible than most of the human characters.
The film’s themes about women’s agency and the ritualized commodification of female bodies are present but handled broadly. Damsel frequently resorts to punchy lines and grand monologues about female suffering and empowerment without mining those ideas for nuance. Strong characters emerge from richly drawn objectives, conflicts, and relationships—the film hints at deeper questions, like the complicity of systems that trade human lives for prosperity, but it rarely pursues them. Where Damsel aims for a modern feminist revision of fairy-tale expectations, it often substitutes rhetoric for dramatic complexity.
Structurally, the movie struggles to commit to Elodie’s growth. If the intention is to show her transformation from a docile figure to a survivor, the script fails to establish the inner life that would make that arc resonant. Scenes meant to create emotional stakes—father-daughter moments, confrontations with the queen, or Elodie’s discovery of the truth—lack the internal conflict and specificity needed to land. Small touches, like Elodie repurposing parts of her wedding dress during an escape, are effective, but isolated moments do not add up to a fully convincing journey.
Visually, the film has moments of beauty: some landscape shots and a few tense sequences in dim caverns. However, the CGI dragon is uneven, and production choices rarely elevate the narrative. Ultimately, Damsel contains intriguing ideas—questions about tradition, sacrifice, and who benefits from systems of power—but it rarely explores them deeply enough to make the film memorable. It’s competent in places and uneven overall, with a central performance that sometimes connects and too often lacks the emotional scaffolding it needs.
Score: 3/24
