Damsel (2024)

Princess Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is traded in to a far and apparently very prosperous country to marry the local prince in trade for the food and riches that will help her famine-plagued home country survive. Independent and a bit wilful, Elodie isn’t terribly happy about this, her starving subjects only being a thought the script mentions when it remembers them. At least the prince (Nick Robinson) she’s bound to marry seems pleasant enough, while her future stepmother (Robin Wright) is rather on the horrid side, and never acts like you’d act towards a girl you’ll spend a considerable amount of time with in the future.

That’s because this is meant to be a very short marriage, for Elodie is not really meant as a long-term daughter-in-law but as a sacrifice to a dragon. So soon, our heroine finds herself thrown into an abyss by her betrothed and hunted through its murder cave by a sadistic dragon who probably shouldn’t have read all those Thomas Harris novels.

On one hand, I’m all in for a film in which a princess supposed to be sacrificed to a particularly unpleasant kind of political convenience strikes back and wins her independence, and I think parts of the fantasy survivalist middle part of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s movie are rather effective.

On the other hand, I find Damsel’s moral stance when it comes to its dragon main villain either completely unexamined or actively repugnant. Apparently, committing serial killings while gloating sadistically over hunting down young women for centuries, during that course shifting an already shitty culture into an even more shitty form is a-okay and totally excused when said culture – whose living members are generations divorced from the inciting incident – once murdered one’s babies. One wrong apparently makes serial killing innocents perfectly alright, forever. Let’s not even talk about the implied suggestion that, if the victims of the dragon were only really of the bloodline of the royal family of Evilstan, and not just poor nobles married into it to die, murdering them would be any better.

Damsel even plays it as a happy ending when our heroine – after teaming up with the dragon to slaughter the royal family in an act of vengeance that at least hits the actual perpetrators of an evil deed - finishes the dubious tale by taking said serial killing dragoness with her to her homeland, a place that also already suffers from a famine having to feed the fucking monster will probably not help alleviate, even if you’re ignore its murderous and sadistic character.

This makes the ethical stance of most vigilante movies look downright progressive; or at least coherent.