It was a storybook wedding, to be sure.
Granted, it was a storybook Elodie never asked to open. She wasn’t ready to be married—and certainly not to a guy she had never even met.
But in the book of fantasy-kingdom politics, sometimes you don’t really have a choice. Elodie’s kingdom—ruled and run by her father, Lord Bayford—was cold and barren, and his people were starving. The land of Aurea was warm and rich. But they were apparently poor in eligible princesses, and Aurea’s Prince Henry was in need of one.
So a deal was struck: Aurea would shower Lord Bayford’s kingdom with gold—enough to buy food and keep his people fed through yet another unimaginably hard winter—and Aurea would gain another member for its royal family. Everyone’s happy, right?
Well, at least for a couple of days.
The palace was magnificent. The land was beautiful. The prince was, well, charming. Elodie’s stepmother was impressed. Elodie’s younger sister, Floria, was enchanted. Henry and Elodie spent an afternoon together, chatting and riding some (naturally exquisite) horses. The next morning, Elodie was dressed in the finest, most complicated gown, and she and Henry were married posthaste.
But that wasn’t the end of the nuptial ceremony.
Elodie and Henry rode a (naturally elegant) carriage up the side of a huge mountain—to pay homage to Henry’s ancestors, he said. And there, Aurea’s glamorous Queen Isabelle told a rather disturbing story.
Hundreds of years ago, when Isabelle’s ancestors first settled this land, they discovered they were not alone. A dragon lived in the mountain. Aurea’s first king tried to conquer the beast, but to no avail. So, after all his own henchmen were slaughtered, the king cut a deal: He sacrificed his three daughters to the dragon. “And a kingdom was born,” Isabelle said.
Well. You’d think that Elodie might’ve been having second thoughts about the wedding right about then. The kingdom she would one day be the queen of had some pretty dark skeletons hiding in its closet, am I right?
But what family doesn’t have its grim chapters? So she smiled and nodded. And when Isabelle cut open her hand, and Henry’s hand, and then pressed their bleeding palms together, Elodie surely thought, “Wow, Aurea has some intense ceremonies, but at least we can get back to the castle now.”
But alas. When Henry picked her up and told her to close her eyes—yet another inexplicable family tradition, Elodie thought—he whispered his apologies and then threw his hours-old bride into a gaping chasm.
Several dozen feet and a few thousand tree branches later, Elodie found herself at the bottom of a deep, dank cave.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. No siree.
Family traditions live on in Aurea, it seems. And the dragon wants its latest sacrifice.
If Henry wasn’t so determined to throw his bride to the dragon, he would have realized that Elodie was quite the catch. She was near perfect, in fact.
When we first meet her and her sister, Floria, Elodie’s chopping wood and instructing Floria to sell the family drapes—using the proceeds to help feed their starving subjects. Though she offers mild resistance to her father’s plan to marry her off, she decides to sacrifice herself for the kingdom. “My happiness is a small price to pay for the future of my people.”
But sacrifice her very life for another kingdom? And under false pretenses, no less? Well, that’s another thing. It takes her a bit of time to adjust to her new circumstances when she lands in the dragon’s lair. But once she does, Elodie proves to be brave, resourceful and awfully pain resistant.
Members of Elodie’s family all have their merits, too. Lord Bayford makes some bad mistakes, but it’s clear that he loves his daughter—even as he tries to do what’s best for his people, too. And he shows a willingness to sacrifice for both.
Lady Bayford—Elodie’s stepmother—proves to be far better than most fairy tale stepmothers. She, in fact, is the only one who seems to have an inkling that something’s off about the Aurean royal family, and she begs Elodie to break off the wedding. And Floria has a few moments where she flashes her own courage, too.
Really, the first sign that something was off about Aurea should’ve been the creepy, red-bedecked priestess who comes as an ambassador to Lord Bayford’s realm. (We know that she’s some sort of cleric, as the lord calls her “your holiness”.) During the sacrificial ceremony on the mountain, Queen Isabelle is dressed in the same blood-red clothes, suggesting that she serves as the head of this particular order.
It seems that religion is an important part of Aurea’s nobility. When Elodie and her family first arrive, they’re told that the royal family is in the middle of prayer (and thus can’t be disturbed). Weddings are presided over by a Catholic-looking cleric dressed in white. Whether this stream of faith is separate from that of the red-cloaked women is unknown.
Lady Bayford’s favorite exclamation is “oh my heavens!”
Elodie undergoes a complicated gown assembly before her wedding. After she’s thrown into the pit, the gown … suffers. By the end of the movie, she’s essentially running around in her Medieval undergarments—petticoat above the knee, shoulder-less top, etc. We occasionally see a bit of cleavage, but nothing more risqué than that.
While Elodie does get hitched, there’s clearly no opportunity for her and Henry to engage in post-ceremonial nuptial pastimes. Nor does anyone make even a veiled reference to matrimonial bliss.
If we were somehow able to strike all the violent content in Damsel, the movie might well earn a PG rating. As it is … well, some moments might make its actual PG-13 rating feel a wee bit light.
Elodie isn’t the only woman to be tossed to the dragon. It’s a regular occurrence, it seems, and Elodie finds plenty of evidence of previous victims. She sees the body of one very fresh fatality—part of her face and body burned something awful from the dragon’s fiery breath. The bones, clothes and jewelry of others are found throughout.
And Elodie certainly doesn’t come away (literally) unscathed. When she falls down the chasm, she’s scratched heavily by tree roots and branches (though they simultaneously break her fall enough to keep her alive). She lands with a thud and is knocked out for a bit. And that’s before she even meets the dragon—who promptly scorches her leg with his fiery breath. (The wound looks pretty serious, but it does heal.) Elodie is burned and otherwise injured elsewhere, too. She has several close calls involving some significant heights—nearly falling off cliffs or slipping to her death while climbing a crystal wall.
The dragon clearly enjoys playing with its prey. It snatches people up in its claws and dashes them against cave walls and stalagmites—after which they bounce lifelessly to the ground. He squashes others like grapes in its taloned claws. The dragon immolates dozens of people, it seems. In one flashback, he torches several armored soldiers, whom we see engulfed in flames, writhing and screaming. One man dies after having a talon shoved through his armored chest, and we see blood trickle out of his mouth.
Some of the movie’s most jarring scenes, though, don’t involve people at all. Elodie discovers a tiny bird that’s been set on fire, and she tries to save the creature by smothering the flames with dirt. But then thousands of birds fly out of a nearby cave chamber—all on fire, all in pain and most slamming into walls or cave formations or fluttering to the ground. We hear their chirps and cries for several seconds thereafter as they slowly expire. A horse also meets its demise via the dragon’s flames, though off camera.
But the dragon suffers, too. It’s stabbed through the throat and claw. A knife finds its eye, and its face is covered with gold-looking blood. Fire nearly consumes it. And, as we learn, the beast suffered a tragic loss much earlier in its story.
The palms of people’s hands are sliced open as part of the ceremony. Someone is stabbed in the gut.
One use of the word “d—n.”
None.
We see an act or two of betrayal.
You can’t really make a stereotypical fairy tale these days. You know, one where a really good prince kills a really evil dragon and rescues a really imperiled princess. We’re all a little too cynical to swallow such stories now, apparently. And society is way too enlightened to suggest that any princess needs saving.
The irony is, of course, that revisionist fairy tales—the ones where the princess kicks some villainous keester and rescues a rascal in distress—have themselves become a bit stereotypical.
Damsel joins the ever-growing ranks of the revisionist fairy tale. Even its title—playing on the idea of a damsel in distress—paired with star Millie Bobby Brown brandishing a sword, makes that clear. This ain’t Snow White.
But Damsel flips the script in a more organic way than some. We don’t get the sense that Elodie hates frilly clothes or flowers: She likes them just fine, and her sister just loves ‘em. But when you’re alone in a maze-like cavern with a person-eating dragon, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. That makes this story feel both traditional and empowering—a nice combination, really.
Indeed, Damsel can be, at times, a nice movie. Sometimes, it feels delightfully old fashioned, what with its gleaming castle and glittering costumes. The fact that Queen Isabelle is played by Robin Wright—who found fame as Princess Buttercup in the The Princess Bride—adds a nice wink to this fantasy.
But, alas, that’s about the only wink this too-serious story makes to better its fantasy forebears. While Damsel minds its manners in many respects, it still feels grim and heavy. And where it doesn’t rein in its content—in its violence—the film can be surprisingly gruesome. The carnage here is a notch or two heavier than your average superhero film or bloodless actioner: People are burned, melted and occasionally squashed into jelly.
And while all those fatalities are still kept at a PG-13 remove, plenty of folks here do not live happily ever after.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
