DAMSEL

BY BOBOC IRINA

OVERVIEW

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Writer: Dan Mazeau
Based on: -
Cinematography: Larry Fong
Music: David Fleming
Producer: Joe Roth, Jeff Kirschenbaum, Chris Castaldi
Distributed by: Netflix
Release date: March 8, 2024
Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy
Duration: 110 minutes
Language: English
Country: The United States
Cast: Millie Bobby Brown (Elodie)
Angela Bassett (Lady Bayford)
Ray Winstone (Lord Bayford)
Nick Robinson (Prince Henry)
Brooke Carter (Floria)
Nicole Joseph (Princess Victoria)
Synopsis:
 The first king of Aurea leads a futile attack on a dragon residing in his cave. All the
king's men are killed, leaving the king at the Dragon's mercy.

The action is postponed centuries later, Elodie, when the adolescent daughter of Lord
Bayford, receives a proposal from Queen Isabelle of Aurea to marry her son, Prince Henry.
On her father's urging, Elodie agrees to the marriage so her dowery can help their
impoverished people. Upon arriving in Aurea, Elodie and Henry are initially uninterested in
each other, but they soon realize they share the same desire of travelling to unknown lands.
Due to the royal’s family strange behaviour, Elodie's stepmother, Lady Bayford, becomes
suspicious leading her to implore Elodie to end the engagement even if her fears are not taken
into consideration by none of the family’s members.

After the wedding, Elodie and Henry take part in an ancient ritual in the mountains,
supposedly to celebrate their union. Isabelle describes the pact between the first king and the
Dragon, where he had to sacrifice his three daughters to ensure peace between his people and
the dragon. Following a ceremony where their palms are cut and held together, Henry carries
Elodie across the narrow path over the Dragon's lair, then throws her down the chasm at
Isabelle's behest.

Soon recovering from the fall, Elodie realizes that she is the actual sacrifice. She
escapes the Dragon after it burns her leg, and discovers an illuminated cave filled with
glowing silk worms, which she collects as a light source. Elodie reaches a chamber with the
note Safe Here She Cannot Reach, the names of past victims, and a map carved into the wall.
In Elodie's sleep, the silk worms heal the burn on her leg.

Elodie follows the map to a dead end at a high vertical drop on the mountainside. She
discovers the remains of dead dragon hatchlings, explaining the reason for the royal sacrifices.
A rescue party led by Lord Bayford arrives. The Dragon kills them, but the distraction allows
Elodie to escape the mountain. She takes one of the rescue party's horses and hides under a
rock as the Dragon burns the surrounding area in an unsuccessful pursuit.

Alerted by the conflagration that Elodie's sacrifice has failed, Isabelle resorts to
kidnapping Elodie's younger sister Floria as a replacement. Elodie returns to the mountain to
rescue Floria, who the dragon has left alive as bait.

Elodie creates a diversion to reach Floria. Telling her sister to hide, she confronts the
Dragon and tries to convince her that they were deceived by the Aureans: by joining their cut
hands at the wedding, the blood of the brides and the Aurean royals mingled, making the
Dragon think of the princesses as being of Aurean descent, when in fact they are not. Refusing
to believe Elodie, the Dragon states that the first king's assault was unprovoked, and then
attacks her, but Elodie tricks her into burning herself. With the Dragon at her mercy, she
convinces the Dragon of the truth. She heals both of them with the glowing silk worms.

Elodie then interrupts the wedding of another sacrifice at the palace, exposing the
Aurean royal family's treachery This time, the Dragon burns the palace with all the Aurean
royals and nobles inside. Days later, Elodie, Floria, and Lady Bayford sail home, loaded with
supplies and accompanied by the Dragon.

Critique: As the subtitle from the official poster suggests, the film is not a fairytale as the
initial title might insinuate. Everything about this film is reversed in order to convey a modern
presentation of several aspects of what a traditional fairytale might involve such as: male
heroes, evil supernatural creatures that show a desire to destroy the humankind and the most
romantic Gothic trope, the damsel in distress. In order to better understand how the reversal
takes place in Damsel, it is extremely appropriate to analyse and closely observe how the
symbolic role of women has evolved over the history centuries starting with eighteen century.

Consequently, according to Manuel Aguirre, the eighteen century features, “the

majority of Gothic males are guided by that ruling passion so fashionable in the late
eighteenth century, while the women are, typically, women of feeling.” (1995, p. 60) Men
versus women with their subsequent qualities displayed in eighteen century Gothic novels is
not to be seen as a matter if clichés. Instead “they reveal archetypal figures placed in contrast
so as to convey the grand conflict of the age, the struggle for the supremacy of the new
Weltanschauung” which in the end leads to the accomplishment of Frankenstein’s and many
other Gothic characters ultimate desire: the overcoming of death. Consequently, passion is
allowed in main Gothic attitudes as long as it liberates strong feelings of defeating death as a
supreme way of placing the man being on the top of the humanity.

Elizabethan era is also worth mentioning as long as some female characters possess
features that will later define Gothic women. In this particular period, women were
characterized by corruption as in the case of the witches which manage to corrupt Macbeth
along with Lady Macbeth. A better example may be considered “the trend whereby the unruly
woman of passion is vilified and the meek, constant woman of feeling praised is The Taming
of the Shrew.” (ibid, p. 61) The types of women with their subsequent characters and tempers
are the models which “inspire the roles woman is to play in Gothic literature, with the
difference that, in the Gothic genre, the woman of passion is in a minority: the shrew has been
generally tamed.” (ibid)

Celtic and Germanic mythology offers an image of the “Theme of King and Goddess”
with at least one special feature: “the transformation which the Lady undergoes in the course
of the story.” (ibid, p. 62) This transformation may be seen at a symbolic level as the cycle of
life and death or the cycle of seasons. In other words, the transformational ability of women is
not to be associated with negative elements that could disturb the universe but the reversed
way. The shrewish role of women is not to be found in Gothic literature the way we are
presented the male role and his negative ability of affecting the universe. Moreover, women
are presented in “over-sensitive role; and yet, even here something of her former importance
lingers in the helpless heroines of the Gothic genre.” (ibid, p 63) Consequently, the damsel in
distress theme is gaining its special place, allowing male characters to conduct the entire
narrative structure of a Gothic story. In modern times, the Age of Reason as previously
presented, is affected by even the change that undertakes the female Gothic character. This
time we have a female Gothic figure closely associated with: “Rosemary, destined to birth the
Antichrist, the great agent of a revolution that will signal the passing of the Age of Reason.
And so, in a way, the Woman of horror literature remains sovereign, numinous, a symbol for
the ever-turning Earth, the Mother of Change.” (ibid)

As a Mother of Change figure is also presented Elodie, the main character of Damsel.
Being initially trapped between her external expectation from the others of saving her
kingdom by marrying an unknown person and her inner desire of fulfilling her own dreams of
travelling and discovering the world she indeed undertakes a journey that seemed to change
its course while developing. As a result of failing to guess the real intentions of the person she
was going to marry, she finds herself in a minute trapped and forced to face death in the
person of an ancient dragon which on its turn has deeper reasons of revenge than ever
imagined. She realizes on the spot that the role of the helpless girl is not any more suitable
and it could cost her life and consequently in a matter of minutes she manages to gather all
her inner force and strength in order to overcome this unexpected process.

Her ability of surviving in that underground trap must be seen in two different
perspectives. On the one hand, Elodie must defeat her own fears and to analyse all the wrong
steps that brought her to that dangerous point of her life and on the other hand, to defeat that
enormous and fearless dragon that seemed to have, at least on the surface, only one life
purpose: that of killing her in the cruelest way ever possible. In conclusion, the over-sensitive
image of women is reversed in this 2024 adaptation in favour of a determined female figure
who has been betrayed by a male character in order to fulfill his personal plans such as to
maintain his position upon the throne.

The image of evil represented by the dragon in Damsel is also changed so as to fit into
the pattern of this modern adaptation of a Gothic tale. Initially presented as a cruel force
uncapable of feelings and willing to kill in order to seek unexplained revenge on human
beings, Elodie sooner discovers that every behaviour has its explanation. Consequently, the
dragon’s violent actions were caused by its grief by having killed its babies centuries ago by
one of the kings of Aurea. This time the monster in the person of the dragon is not presented
as the Other in the basic sense of the concept, but a direct consequence of human beings’
reckless actions. On a deeper level, the dragon that Elodie must fight against in order to
survive may represent an alter ego of herself: “The true power of the Gothic novel rests in its
exploitation of the monster and the grotesque body to produce horror and terror: the ability to
reveal that our fears, anxieties, dreams and desires of ‘the Other’ — the foreigner, the savage,
the alien, the profoundly unknowable- are but a reflection of the potentiality for darkness and
depravity that lurks deep within us all.” (Owen Morawitz, 2020)

In conclusion, far from being interpreted as a romance or a light fairytale where in the
end “they lived happily ever after”, Damsel aligns itself to 21st century preoccupations and
displays to the audience the general theme of betrayal and inner discovery, themes which
overlap with Gothic motifs and symbols which define the general frame of the adaptation
adding to it suspense.

BIBILIOGRAPHY
Morawitz, Owen, 2020, Monster: Gothic Fiction and Otherness [online]
Available at: https://medium.com/the-pitch-of-discontent/the-monster-is-never-the-monster-
gothic-monstrosity-and-otherness-8b54c3a5b9ee (accessed on April 2024)
Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Schneider, Christina, 2015, Monstrosity in the English Gothic Novel [online]

Available at: journals.sfu.ca/vict/index.php/vict/article/view/151/76 (accessed on April 2024)

Tibbetts, John C. The Gothic Imagination: Conversations on Fantasy, Horror, and Science
Fiction in the Media. Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2011.