Taking age-old expectations of how a fairytale is supposed to play out and giving them a brisk shuffle is by no means as fresh as some film-makers often like to think, upending cliches with a tired wink and a smug smirk. But Netflix’s Damsel, itself loosely similar to Hulu’s 2022 offering The Princess, doesn’t require our astonishment at its wheel reinvention to pass the bar and is far too sprightly to get overly bogged down in the self-satisfaction of such an endeavour.
There are, in fact, very few surprises in store here – perhaps Fast X writer Mazeau’s script could have benefitted from a few – but there’s a simple, mechanical satisfaction to watching an underdog fight her way back from the depths, driven by a familiar current of revenge. For Elodie (Netflix’s in-house leading lady Millie Bobby Brown), her journey starts in a different kind of strife. Her family, led by father (Ray Winstone) and stepmother (Angela Bassett) are struggling and so are her people, in need of a miracle to save them. It magically arrives as an offer of marriage, a handsome prince from a far away kingdom (Nick Robinson) wants to make her his wife, steered by a strong-willed queen (Robin Wright). But her happy ending is in fact an unhappy beginning, the wedding part of an ancient ritual that sees her hurled into a cave, sacrificed to a dragon. Romance curdles into horror as Elodie must scramble back to safety.
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