From pretty much the word go it's clear that Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's Damsel (streaming on the big N) is a Bad Fantasy film, by which I mean one gets no sense that any of the people or places in it didn't just tumble down out of the sky two seconds before the story started. There's no sense that any thought has gone into working out the history or functioning of the film's secondary world in a coherent or rigorous way, every fact and detail about it is either there for aesthetic reasons or because it specifically serves the story that the film-makers want to make. In this case, for example, some of the characters have European-derived names like Henry even though it plainly isn't set in Europe, and the buildings there mix up features of Gothic and Italianate architecture with a gay abandon that would probably make Sir Kenneth Clark weep.

I grumble a lot about Bad Fantasy films but I suppose I should say that there's no obvious reason why it should be impossible to make a good Bad Fantasy film – it's just that it never seems to happen. Hawk the Slayer has its own subtle pleasures, I suppose, and there's always Krull   – but in this latter case I can't rule out nostalgia clouding my judgement. Why would you want to set out to make a Bad Fantasy film, anyway, given you can always have a go at making an actual Good Fantasy film?

But anyway. After some prefatory business we find ourselves in a wintry land under the stewardship of Lord Bayford (cor blimey guv'nor, it's Ray Winston), whose subjects are regularly cold and starving (though I must point out Lord Bayford himself has a bit of a paunch on him). Quite whom Lord Bayford is responsible to is rather mysterious – he effectively seems to be monarch of his land, but as it is a crucial plot point that his family are not royalty, he's stuck as a lord, nominally at least.

Possibly as a result of this, his eldest daughter Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown, who is also one of the executive producers) has no shortage of the common touch; we first meet her out and about chopping wood to help the suffering peasants (some very subtle messaging here telling us she is a Strong Independent Woman who doesn't need no damn woodsman to supply her kindling needs). But the country, or whatever it is, is still struggling and she is surprised to come home one day to find envoys from the distant land of Aurea attempting to arrange her marriage to their local prince.

Elodie, being a Strong Independent Woman, isn't keen on the idea, but the Aureoles are offering a load of cash and so she says yes so everyone can be fed and warm. Off she goes with the rest of the not-royal family to meet the in-laws (principally Robin Wright as Queen Isabelle). Aurea turns out to be a terribly nice place and Elodie spends a good few minutes wandering about marvelling at the sheer natural beauty of the local CGI, which stretches off as far as the eye can see. Meanwhile the film is trying to establish its credentials as a proper piece of mock-historical drama. 'I have drawn a bath and instructed that food be brought hence,' declares the butler sonorously – however, by the end of the film most of the dialogue has devolved to the level of lines like 'I'm through doin' what I'm told!'

It soon becomes apparent that the Aureoles are not the paragons of virtue they initially appear to be. Actually, one never buys into the idea that the Aureoles are actually nice guys, as the indication that They Are Up To Something is inserted into the film with all the subtlety of a mallet to the head. It turns out they have a dragon problem (as indicated by the first scene of the film), which they are attempting to mitigate by keeping it regularly fed with princesses sourced from elsewhere – Elodie is given a sort of blood transfusion so she smells properly regal to the dragon (voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo), which is about the level that most of the plot operates on. Soon enough she is chucked into the pit wherein the dragon resides. . .

And after an opening section which resembles a slightly wearisome modern-style fairy tale, the film undergoes an abrupt shift of style and becomes, of all things, a sort of survival horror movie about Elodie's travails while she is stuck in the dragon's lair and trying to find a way out before it eats her. This is. . . well, I hesitate to say it's actually good, but it's better than the opening, reasonably inventive, and sometimes visually adroit (Elodie is thrown into the pit in all her wedding finery and her transformation into a hard-as-nails warrior woman in the course of the story is reflected in the way her costume gradually disintegrates, leaving her in the kind of outfit favoured by Maureen O'Sullivan in those old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan flicks).

I guess the message that the makers of Damsel are trying to put across is that young girls can be Strong Independent Women too and don't need to worry about handsome princes or knights in armour turning up to rescue them. Which I suppose it succeeds at, although not very subtly or imaginatively. The problem is that the film feels really pleased with itself for doing this, as though there is something really ground-breaking or subversive about daring to suggest this. And, obviously, there isn't. This film is singing along with the orthodoxy, and that in itself isn't enough.

And if it is being subversive, what exactly is it subverting? The story of the maiden and the dragon and the handsome prince is part of folklore, heavily steeped in Christian mythology and symbolism – you can be subversive about this all you like, but it doesn't follow that you're striking a blow against anything that really matters any more. You can't even argue that the film has any serious claim to be a feminist take on fantasy tropes, unless your idea of feminism is reducing all men to the status of spineless, clueless dimwits. The heroine is a woman, the dragon is female, and the actual villain of the piece is also a woman – so you end up with a kind of zero-sum situation with a questionable relationship to reality which most people would probably hope wasn't accurate in the first place.

Obviously, in this kind of film a lot ends up resting on the shoulders of the protagonist, not least because she ends up carrying the middle hour or so of it single-handed (well, along with the VFX technicians). Now, I like Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger Things, and she was okay in her Godzilla movies too – but the first Enola Holmes movie (which she also produced) really wound me up, to the point where I avoided the sequel. Damsel, as you may have gathered, didn't strike me as being much cop either – it has a humourless earnestness about it which is really echoed in Brown's own performance. In the end, she comes across rather like Netflix's own-brand version of Natalie Portman and you can't help feeling that potential is going unused here.

Damsel is the sort of film which is usually a safe bet for the big N – it looks reasonably good, has some famous faces in it, ticks all the right boxes to make people coo about it on social media, and isn't horribly dysfunctional as a piece of basic storytelling. But if you actually think about it in any systematic way it turns out to be well-intentioned junk. I imagine Damsel will be reasonably well received by the young female audience which I suspect it is largely aimed at, and also anyone who has a fetish for watching young women's clothing slowly fall to bits in titillating but family-friendly style (hey, I don't judge). Anyone else may find it a bit of an ordeal, and I'm not talking about the events on screen.

Awix

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