Damsel review: Why is Millie Bobby Brown wasting her time on this blunt-force empowerment dreck?
Netflix’s Millie Bobby Brown micro-industry continues apace with Damsel, which revives the blunt-force teen girl empowerment of the Enola Holmes series, dresses it up for ren faire, and then strips it of all its joy. Here, the Stranger Things star plays the headstrong, pure-hearted Elodie, a dutiful child to Ray Winstone’s Lord Bayford, and a loving stepdaughter to Angela Bassett’s Lady Bayford. She agrees to be married off to a prince (Nick Robinson) in order to save their fiefdom from ruin.
Damsel, in its opening titles, proudly announces that this isn’t one of those stories where the princess is left to wither in her tower, awaiting rescue by her one true love. But we’re more than two decades into a post-Shrek world, and the concept of an anti-fairytale where the women can kick butt is now about as fresh as a Batman film where we see how his parents die. It’s not really something you have to announce ahead of time, even if the film tries to tip its hat to the genre’s history by casting The Princess Bride’s Robin Wright as the kingdom’s duplicitous queen.
Anyway, when Elodie finds herself not happily wed and instead tossed into a cave as a sacrifice to a vengeful dragon (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo), no one’s all that surprised. Yet, even if Damsel isn’t breaking new ground, there’s still plenty of appeal in the teen-friendly, pop fantasy tale (every generation deserves their own version of 2007’s Stardust, after all). And the film starts off promisingly by enlisting Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves costume designer Amanda Monk to play around with puffed-up sleeves, maximalist crowns, and blasphemous-looking nun habits – the kind of hardcore fantasy aesthetics that you probably would have been bullied for liking in the Eighties.
But then we hit the cave, and the film deteriorates into nothing but Brown bouncing off various rocks and yowling in pain like she’s auditioning for a remake of The Descent, that subterranean horror from 2005. It’s an odd tonal pivot, underlined by the choice to hire director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, otherwise known for his zombie sequel 28 Weeks Later.
It plays as if it should be a horror film, without any trace of actual horror, while its feminist identity is whittled down to Elodie having to grit her teeth and bear several limbs being BBQed by dragon’s breath. There are not one, but three separate montages where she symbolically strips away her corseted regalia for a more practical, battle-ready look (see how she shuns the shackles of patriarchy!). The film, too, strains itself to come up with a narrative reason for why Elodie should need to shorn her waist-length locks. Surely there must be more ways for a woman to liberate herself that don’t directly end with a trendy, little bob?
It’s hard to imagine what anyone could get out of Damsel that isn’t already liberally covered by Brown’s other projects. There’s a sweetness to Stranger Things’s Eleven, and a wit to Enola, that offer the actor a hell of a lot more to do than Damsel’s mean-mugging to camera. Dan Mazeau’s script feels like it was spun out of a series of girlboss Facebook memes – “we are the granddaughters of the princesses you couldn’t burn”, or “there is a special place in hell for girl dragons who don’t help other women”-type business. There’s a real moment of concern where it looks like Elodie might try to enlist the ancient dragon into a multi-level marketing scheme. The sentiment is appreciated, Netflix, but you may have been better off just making Enola Holmes 3.
Dir: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Starring: Millie Bobby Brown, Ray Winstone, Nick Robinson, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Angela Bassett, Robin Wright. 12, 109 minutes.
‘Damsel’ is streaming on Netflix
