I was pretty excited to watch Damsel (2024) because: 1. Millie Bobby Brown is a delight, 2. I’m a huge fan of maidens saving themselves, and 3. I love a good dragon redemption story. But! After a decent start, the movie just slid deeper and deeper into a chasm of stereotypical ideas about scorned women, feminine innocence, and female beauty. All well and good if that’s your jam, I suppose, but I felt like I was being fed the same old lie about how women can succeed, which mostly men have been spinning since forever. The plot holds up to scrutiny like a house of cards in a stiff breeze. The special effects, which I think I’m usually pretty forgiving about, could be considered good only if they were intended to be camp, and the dragon looks like she was assembled from spare parts. However, Millie Bobby Brown was still a joy to watch, and she carried this mostly lackluster affair almost entirely on her shoulders.
Long, long ago there was a king who, in the company of a bunch of well-armed men, tried to slay a dragon. Instead, the dragon burned all his soldiers up until they were little more than hot writhing coals. At which point, the King fell upon his knees and, with tears in his eyes, begged the dragon to make a deal. Now, centuries later, we’re about find out just how royally he fucked things up.
Capable, caring, and generous, Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) lives with her father Lord Bayford (Ray Winstone), her stepmother Lady Bayford (Angela Bassett), and her younger sister Floria (Brooke Carter) in the harsh and barren Northern lands, where famine and poverty threaten to decimate the people. One day, as Elodie and her sister chop down a lone tree in a sweeping landscape of stumps and prepare to haul it back toward town to be distributed amongst the people for fuel, they watch a richly decorated carriage heading toward city walls.
Once at home they learn that Elodie has been promised in marriage to Prince Henry of Aurea. Elodie, who is, from what little we know, fiercely independent, doesn’t think much of this plan. Her father tells her she can travel and see the world. She says that’s no reason to get married. And she’s not wrong, you know? Then he starts laying it on thick about how “her people need her” and there isn’t enough in the stores to last through winter and “this is who we are.” All well and good when YOU’RE NOT THE ONE MARRYING SOME GUY IN A FAR OFF LAND SIGHT UNSEEN IN EXCHANGE FOR GOODS, POPS.
They sail across the sea to Aurea where the land is lush and fertile and the riches are everywhere. Or everywhere except for this dark looming mountain that seems to rise from the depths of the earth. Everyone is incredibly welcoming, but, oh, the warning signs are everywhere. They put Elodie in a sumptuous tower room, and we all know that absolutely no good has ever come to a young woman shut up in a tower room. None. Prince Henry (Nick Robinson) is kind and shares her interest in travel, but he seems somewhat sad and beaten down around the edges, which you would be too if you had his job. His mother, Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright) is austere, domineering, and arrogant. The King (Milo Twomey) hardly speaks at all.
A nice welcome to the neighborhood. 
Apparently sacrificing young women is a lucrative business. 
The dragon iconography is very subtle. 
Oh, sweet summer child. That’s not a penthouse. It’s a trap. 
You’d think they’d at least stagger the young maidens marrying the prince out enough so they didn’t cross paths. 
Meeting the kind of in-laws. Does the king look like the Burger King guy? Or is it just me?
Queen Isabelle meets in private with Lord Bayford to go over the finer points of the marriage contract, and while he won’t say a word about what was said, he leaves the room a changed man; ashen-faced, hunched, short-tempered, and seemingly resigned to a drastic fate. Frightened by this development and further upset by a conversation with the queen, Lady Bayford implores Elodie to stop the wedding, but Elodie puts her faith in her father and plows ahead with the plans. Now, by this point we know Queen Isabelle clearly has a nefarious plan up her gold-gilded sleeves, but the question is, Why on earth would she share the details with the betrothed’s Papa Bear? What possible sense would that make? Give that man his treasure trove of gold and send him on his way. What if he were to blab about this to other far off lands and word were to spread? What if he decided he valued his daughter over his people and high-tailed it back to the barren north? Oh, yes, it’s all a set-up for something later and it’s just what villains do in movies like these, but that still doesn’t mean it makes a lick of sense.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Elodie is trussed up in layers upon layers of skirts and hoops and sleeves and other kinds of finery before she is trotted out to marry Prince Henry. She’s melancholy but happy as she says goodbye to her family, and she’s only curious when Henry tells her they must go up to the craggy peak right away to complete a family ritual. When they arrive they are greeted by a silent group of people wearing gold masks who stand at the mouth of a cave. Now, Elodie probably doesn’t have this information because I doubt the Barren North gets much in the way of streaming services or even Cable, but you and I know from watching enough shows and movies that if you EVER encounter a silent group of people in freaky gold masks, it’s time to run like hell. Elodie does not. The queen essentially makes her of royal blood by slicing her palm and Prince Henry’s palm and mashing them together. And then Prince Henry tosses her over the edge into the chasm where she crash lands into the dragon’s lair. Oops. Did they forget to mention that small detail?
Like, do people realize they’re making giant vaginas and that’s the whole point, but they just don’t want to point it out? Or did this movie really go through all the editing processes and viewings and no one said, “You know what? The opening to the dragon’s cave looks like a vagina.”
You see, all those centuries ago, the story went that the dragon had been terrorizing the village and the King just wanted her to stop. The dragon demanded the King sacrifice his three daughters and in exchange she would leave the rest of the people in peace for a year. And every year thereafter three more royal daughters of the kingdom would have to be sacrificed in perpetuity. The King, being SUCH a stand up noble guy agreed to this plan, even though he loved his daughters very, very much, but he believed in the greater good even more. I mean, not the greater good of three young women times however many years this has been going on for, but the greater good of everyone who counts. So this is why they have to import young women and go through this whole pageant. I have a question here as well. If it’s just a matter of slapping some bloody palms together, then couldn’t they just nab any girl from anywhere? Couldn’t they have started some very dystopian breeding program of dragon sacrifice women?
Inside the dragon’s lair, it quickly dawns on Elodie that she is the sacrifice and, as she gets her bearings, that she is far from the first. The ground is strewn with wedding jewels that twinkle and glint against the dark rocks. When she ventures deeper into the caverns, following a glowing light and strange flapping sound, she finds a bird, burning and flapping in terror. Just as she helps the bird, she hears the dragon roar and the room fills with thousands of flaming birds, each one screaming and hurtling blindly toward the stalagmites that stand like a forest.
The dragon—whose voice (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is rich and deep and smokey and almost purring—teases and terrorizes Elodie as she chases her through the cavernous, twisting underground maze of her lair. (She also stretches out Elodie’s name so she sounds a bit like E.T. pronouncing Elliot for the first time.)
When Elodie scrambles and shimmies her way into a space where the dragon cannot reach, the dragon only laughs and says that one way or another she’s gonna get her. I’m paraphrasing, but the evidence is clear that all the previous women have either been eaten or died of starvation. Not exactly hopeful statistics. But Elodie is not one to give up, and she’s pissed that she’s been dropped into this situation, so she continues onward, searching for a way out, a way through, a solution. She finds bio-luminescent glow slugs that help her find her way through the dark and heal her wounds. One of the lines I enjoyed is when she holds one of the glowing, squelchy creatures between her fingers and tells it tenderly, “I’m deeply sorry for…underestimating you.” The slug doesn’t respond.
A lot of the movie is Elodie and the dragon, the dragon and Elodie playing a life-or-death underground game of hide and seek while one of them tries to figure out why the other is so, so angry all the time. It turns out the original king may have left a few details out of the story he brought back to his people. Like the fact that the dragon wasn’t terrorizing the people at all, and was, in fact, tending to the last of her offspring, which he viciously killed. Unmoored by this loss and seeking revenge, the dragon then asked the king to sacrifice three of his own in return. Understandable, but there is also a huge whiff of “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” in here and the trope of a mother’s vengeance, which is tired and worn and gets women themselves absolutely nowhere. It keeps us pinned in place, which I don’t think is what the movie is actually arguing. These young women are currently consigned to their fate by the queen, who is perhaps protecting her son and subjects, but it seems she is mostly protecting herself and her own status. Another caricature of a powerful, evil woman without any real interest or reason (beyond tradition) for her actions. It’s flat and empty. A lot of the story focuses on the lost young women (and dragons) and how no harm should come to anyone’s “innocent daughters,” which is a phrase that immediately raised my hackles, because what of the sinners, harlots, and heretics? Do they not also deserve safety and a life of their own? Whenever someone starts to bring up the “innocent daughters” I start to wonder if they really care about or want to understand women (or dragons) fully.
ETA: My friend made a good point that Queen is also responding to the weight of living under and having to carry out this horrid tradition, which was foisted upon her by some incompetent ancestor. And now she basically has to do everything herself because she can’t rely on anyone else to get the job done. She also pointed out that, unlike a lot of stories in this genre, this one had a good balance between the genders and women are represented as full-fledged characters.
As the movie progresses, Elodie, of course, changes physically. Her wedding dress gets torn. She rips off a sleeve to carry the glow slugs as a lantern. She tears strips off to bind her wounds. Little by little the dress disappears, but, oddly enough, as it does the neckline gets more hoisted, perkier, the waistline gets more cinched, the skirt falls just so across her thighs, her eyes are outlined in black, until she resembles, I suppose, some ideal of a powerful warrior woman who gained sex appeal in the process. Why not? You could say. What’s wrong with a woman celebrating her body? Nothing. But this is just the usual ideal of a woman. Strong, but still feminine. Independent, but still approachable. Grungy, but still sexy. She could be goddamned naked in that cave if it were presented from a different perspective and I’d have less to say about it.
A reminder of how she looks before she gets dropped in the cave. 
Here we see her as she gains independence as loses innocence. Her sleeves have disappeared, her skirt is ripped, but look how perfectly her decolletage is framed. 
This is a moment of reckoning when the (pun not intended) scales fall away from her eyes. I’m not all sure when she had time to apply lipstick or eyeliner. 
I swear to you, she goes into a pool of water with straps and comes out without them and also with her breasts hoinked farther up, her waist more cinched, and her eyeliner darker. I guess it was a reverse baptism? 
And here you can see the full look. She’s so badass, but she still looks like a male fantasy. Fuck off.
But look, all my (very valid) concerns aside, there is still fun to be had in watching this movie. Millie Bobby Brown scales sheer rock face using only a small letter-opener-like thing, and she climbs a tube of crystals that, if you’re of a certain age, will remind of the ones you used to grow in a jar. There were a lot of over the top special effects moments that made me snort. And I would say that, during the first forty minutes of the movie, I genuinely thought it might be going places. A bit slowly, but still going places. Plus, I just really enjoyed the dragon’s voice. And while whole bits made my eyeballs strain, I really did appreciate watching Millie Bobby Brown run confidently around the depths of the earth with nothing but her whits, a tiara, a letter opener, and some glowing slugs to defend herself. So, while this particular damsel found some aspects distressing, I wouldn’t say you need to save yourself the trouble of watching it entirely. (No. That last line was absolutely uncalled for. I’ll see myself out.)
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 