Netflix
Considering she just turned 20, this is nothing to sneeze at. There’s her intrepid work as Eleven in all those seasons of thephenomenally popularThings.
Now, withDamsel, she stars in a medieval action-fantasy — a highly entertaining one — and proves she can handle a dragon just as well as Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen did on HBO’sGame of Thrones. (Better, actually, when you remember how all that firepower messed with Daenerys’s mind. A red-hot mess, wasn’t she? Kind of sad, really.)
Brown plays Elodie, a girl who lives in a cold, cash-strapped province in what’s described merely as a “faraway land.”
Her father and stepmother, the Lord and Lady Bayford (Ray Winstone andAngela Bassett), arrange for her to marry into the fabulously wealthy royal family of a distant kingdom. Elodie bridles at not being allowed to have her choice of husband, but she’s also sensible — they’re all hungry and freezing in her neck of the woods.
John Wilson / Netflix
But Stepmother (is that her first name?) senses that something is dreadfully off. She’s right. Elodie is really just a ritual sacrifice, a token peace offering to the local dragon. It’sMidsommarwith a reptile.
As soon as the nuptials are concluded, she’s dropped — with no more fond adieu than if she were a sack of laundry — into a very deep pit. Down she plunges into the complex of caves, crevices and tunnels the dragon calls home. The real-estate development potential is enormous.
Elodie’s fight against the dragon has a strong whiff ofThings’otherworldly hells. The production design, here and throughout the film, is first-rate.
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By then Elodie has climbed crystal rock faces, applied phosphorescent leeches to her wounds and provoked the queen to utter the immortal line: “I knew that damn girl would be trouble.”
Damselis on Netflix Friday.
source: people.com
