Princess stories tend to go one of two ways: They can be in distress and need their prince to come to their rescue, or they can be the epitome of girl power. Where Damsel shines is that it doesn’t lean into either of these tropes and lets Princess Elodie save herself.
It would be easy to make Damsel your typical princess story where the man swoops in to save the day. Instead, Millie Bobby Brown’s Elodie is thrown into an impossible situation and fights her way out using her intelligence. Elodie is marrying Prince Henry (Nick Robinson) and despite his mother, Queen Isabelle (Robin Wright), having a strange energy towards Elodie’s family, her father, the King (Ray Winstone), insists they go through with it.
What Elodie finds is a twisted fate where the “wife” of Prince Henry is thrown, as a sacrifice, to the dragon below. Elodie is not someone who is necessarily strong, but she does use her intellect to find ways of surviving. Where this could have easily been a cheesy take on girl power, Damsel never crosses that line. We see in real time how Elodie uses her own strength to find ways of surviving.
That, to me, is why Damsel is so much fun to watch. It’s not pushing this unrealistic situation into the world (well, there is a dragon), and everything that Elodie does to survive is something that seems completely feasible for someone of her age.
The deeper you get into the lore, the more twisted Damsel becomes, but without Elodie at the heart of it, it wouldn’t work. Instead, we have a princess with heart who tries to connect with everything around her, and it, ultimately, is what keeps her going when the odds are stacked against her. Without her, this movie wouldn’t work.
A princess with power
Brown is no stranger to playing strong women. If it’s not Eleven on Stranger Things, she’s commanding the screen as Sherlock Holmes’ little sister in the Enola Holmes series. Where Elodie differs is that she doesn’t always have to find ways of surviving like Eleven and Enola. She’s a princess with a wonderful family, and she simply thought she was marrying a prince.
So we’re watching, in real time, what she will do in order to stay alive. It’s a story of resilience when your back is against the cave wall. Elodie doesn’t use brute strength to survive, and that’s something that was surprisingly refreshing to see. What Damsel boils down to is a girl with the will to live.
Even seeing a giant CGI dragon talking to her wasn’t as shocking as it should be. The fantastical elements of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s film all feel cohesive in the universe that he’s built, and so when there are moments where it is clearly a CGI creation, you’re not taken out of the story overall. For all its quirks and the typical story we can figure out from the jump, it is still refreshing to see a princess story like Damsel.
Damsel is on Netflix on March 8.
(featured image: Netflix)
