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.

In short: The Princess Bride (1987)

Rob Reiner’s fantasy comedy might very well be the most difficult to hate film of all times; perhaps because it is practically impossible not to love.

And there is truly a lot to love here, as most anyone reading this will know: be it the way William Goldman’s script shifts the emphasis of his own novel he is adapting here quite decidedly in many points towards something genuinely sweeter than the book is, further away from some of the book’s (not that) hidden bitterness. Be it how Goldman treats the clichés of the fairy tale romance he works with here with irony without things actually becoming cynical, as if he had had the realization that the dream of the world being kinder and better (or simply more surprising) in nature is not a thing only to mock even if one has come to see it as the cause of some of one’s own pain.

Also lovely are all of the performances, be it by a very young Robin Wright in not actually her first movie role as some say (let’s not even speak of the years in the soap opera mills she was still working in when this was made) playing Princess Buttercup in the only way to make the role work, absolutely straight; be it André the Giant being as charming as ever a wrestler was on screen; be it Mandy Patinkin doing a note-perfect ironic Errol Flynn. Why, I don’t even mind Billy Crystal’s scene here.

The film’s great trick apart from its tone is of course how genuinely funny it is, with a humour that’s not only based on all those many quotable lines but also an ability to not go for the most obvious joke all of the time but more often than not for the one that’s the decisive bit stranger and more off-beat.


And, you know: “Hello! My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father. Prepare to die!”