DamselReview:Stranger Things' Millie Bobby Brown Fights a Fire-Breathing Dragon in Exciting Netflix Film

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