Damsel Ending Explained: How does Elodie Escape the Dragon? (who is saved and who dies)
Damsel, the new modern fairy tale starring Millie Bobby Brown, arrived on Netflix on the occasion of Women’s Day to launch a message of female empowerment to the audience of the streaming platform and teach girls that they can and must save themselves. But how does the film end? Who is killed by the dragon and who manages to save himself? Let’s find out together. But in the meantime, here’s a little recap on the plot of Damsel. “There are many chivalric stories in which the heroic knight rescues the Damsel in distress. This is not one of them,” we hear in the opening bars of Damsel, the fantasy film directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and with Millie Bobby Brown in the role of Elodie, a princess destined to change the narrative of her life and, with it, that of fairy tales.
Damsel is the story of Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown), a girl who has to find her inner strength with which to overcome a difficult situation: her father has married her to the prince of the kingdom of Áurea so, with the dowry, she can help the people, who are dying of hunger because of the harshness and sterility of the territories that make up their domains. On Netflix since March 8, in Damsel there are charismatic queens and stepmothers like Robin Wright and Angela Basset, princes not as gallant as assumed (Nick Robinson), a dragon and a terrible curse around this creature, the other main protagonist of this fairy tale in which nothing is as it seems.
Damsel: Summary Recap
Elodie is the eldest daughter of the Lord of a remote land, very poor and devastated by increasingly harsh winters. The situation seems desperate but salvation comes in a completely unexpected way: a marriage proposal from the rulers of Aurea for Prince Henry, heir to a rich kingdom that they have never heard of. Elodie immediately accepts because she understands what it could mean for her people and she sets off with the whole family: her father, her stepmother, and her little sister Floria. Having arrived at their destination, Elodie and her family are welcomed with great pomp, amidst pomp and incredible riches. Even the betrothed isn’t even that bad, on the contrary, Henry seems genuinely interested in the young woman, who immediately begins to reciprocate.
It’s a shame that something sinister is hidden among the smiles and coaxing of the future in-laws, but – with Elodie too convinced of Henry’s good faith – the only one who realizes it seems to be their stepmother (Angela Basset). Things take a tragically unexpected turn when on the day of the wedding, during a ceremony in honor of the ancestors of the royal family of Aurea, Henry throws Elodie into a well inside a mountain, sacrificing her in the name of a creature who he made those rocks his lair. Having survived the fall, Elodie will soon realize that she must use all her skills and ingenuity to survive the beast that wanders in the dark, and that only wants to incinerate her: an ancient dragon to which the brides of the princes of Aurea are sacrificed, after centuries before a king had dared to challenge him. Saving yourself seems impossible, among rivers of fire, dark caves, and very dangerous overhangs, but Elodie hides many more resources within herself than one could ever imagine…
Damsel Ending Explained: How does Elodie Escape the Dragon?
“My happiness is a small price for the future of my people,” says Elodie as she walks with her fiancé, Prince Henry, through the gardens of the royal castle of the kingdom of Aurea. As soon as she arrives at what is to be her new home, along with her father, her stepmother, Lady Bayfort (Basset), and her sister Floria (Brooke Carter), she is dazzled by the majesty. of the kingdom and the kindness of her fiancé. But the beauty of that place hides a terrible and dark secret, as the shadows of the mountains that surround the castle invite us to imagine, among other small and significant details. This is what her stepmother warns Elodie about, after a tense conversation in which the monarch Isabelle (Wright) belittles her for her humble origins puts her on alert.
Despite everything, the engagement goes ahead and Elodie ends up marrying the heir. After the marriage ceremony, Henry and Elodie board the royal carriage and head to the mountains, and pay tribute to the heir’s ancestors. There, a carpet of rose petals leads them to a nook in the steep mountain where a group of masked nobles, along with Queen Isabelle, are waiting for them. It is then that the queen, to Elodie’s confusion, tells her the following, preparing her for what is to come: “For generations it has been our mission and duty to protect our people, the price is great but so is the reward. Tonight, you will join a legacy of women who have helped build this kingdom”.
Thus, after Isabelle cuts the palm of his hand to mix her blood with that of the prince, Henry ends up throwing her into the depths of the mountain and, with it, into the jaws of the dragon, thirsty for revenge later. that the monarchs’ ancestors, the first invaders, killed the creature’s offspring. The dragon was hatching three offspring, which were mercilessly annihilated by the first colonizers centuries ago. It is at this moment that we reach the climax of the film, Elodie’s long stretch in the cave and her double confrontation: she will have to deal with the dragon but also with herself, on a journey of initiation in which she will discover that she has been used and is the latest of countless girls who have been murdered to calm the anger of the ‘monster’.
When our protagonist decides to confront the dragon, the situation will change. Elodie finally finds her way out of the mountain, after several unsuccessful escape attempts and after her father redeems himself from betrayal by dying in the dragon’s clutches; But she is forced to return when Queen Isabelle kidnaps Floria and throws her into the depths of the cave when she realizes that things are not going as they should. In her sister’s rescue operation, Elodie seeks to connect with the dragon: “We have both been lied to,” she confesses. “I know what they did to you,” she continues, without quite convincing the creature that she does not belong to the lineage of the kingdom of Áurea. In a battle to the death, Elodie plunges her sword into the dragon’s heart and sets a trap that causes the dragon to burn in her fire.
Mortally wounded by burns, the dragon asks Elodie to finish her off, but the protagonist refuses and decides to heal the creature using the blue, fluorescent organisms with which she had previously healed her wounds. Elodie and the dragon will thus be united by a common revenge and path of survival. Meanwhile, at the royal castle of Aurea, Henry is marrying another innocent girl. At the moment of the exchange of rings, a coin rolls across the floor of the patio until it reaches Isabella’s feet, who picks it up only to realize that Elodie, very bruised, makes an appearance. Henry rushes over to apologize to her and Isabella reproaches him, calling the young woman a commoner.
“Will she be the third?” Elodie asks about the novice, turning to her and urging her to run away from there with her family. “Why would we fear you?” Isabella arrogantly asks, to which a confident Elodie responds: “She is not the one you should fear. This is the end of your story”, and the dragon immediately appears from the heavens, ready for her revenge to become effective. The dragon, standing in a pose similar to that of Elodie, launches a very powerful flame from her mouth that kills Queen Isabella, the king, and Prince Henry, to finally take revenge for the murder of her three baby dragons, the last of their dynasty. From the castle, in flames, a calm Elodie emerges, completely transformed: she no longer sports long hair, but short hair, as well as her wedding dress, which the heroine has torn apart during her stay in the cave to move more comfortably, and l The bruises on the skin speak of her transition from girl to woman. An overhead shot shows us the protagonist crossing the bridge accompanied by the shadow of the dragon, as if both the girl and the creature had blended into a single being.
An Epilogue on the Female Bonds of ‘Damsel‘
In Damsel‘s epilogue, we find ourselves on a dock, still in the kingdom of Aurea, where Elodie’s old family has been transformed, with the death of her father, into a family of women, a small matriarchy that has many challenges ahead. . Among them, the challenge of governing together, as Elodie wishes, who trusts that collaboration will be the most successful way to govern her kingdom. When they set sail at dusk, Floria, amazed, calls her stepmother to go see something that appears in the sky. Elodie stands at the stern of the ship looking safely at the horizon. The dragon appears behind her, at whom the protagonist looks conspiratorially. War princess on the boat and dragon in the skies, the camera accompanies them as they approach the sunset line.
It is an outcome that unites Elodie’s initiatory journey, who returns home knowing the dangers and betrayals of life, but with something she never expected to possess: the friendship of a dragon who protects her like a mother and who she has seen in She has a daughter to accompany on every adventure under an unbreakable bond. These are not the only bonds between women that emerge strengthened from the experience: the daughters and the stepmother renew their trust in a pact of sincere collaboration, and the two sisters, preserving their kind vision of the world, have realized that the story of the defenseless Damsels is a lie and that there is nothing better in the world than having each other to fight adversity and celebrate triumphs.
Meaning of The Ending
How does Damsel end? Elodie, the protagonist of the film, after managing to get out of the cave with the fire-breathing dragon, is forced to go back inside because she discovers from her stepmother that her little sister was taken by the royal family to be sacrificed exactly like her. The dragon, after all, needed 3 victims to fulfill the pact with the kingdom. Thus, Elodie returns to the cave where, shortly before her, her father who was looking for her had been killed by the dragon, sacrificing himself to save her. Once Elodie returns, she finds her body and through tears understands that she must do everything to save her sister. She searches for her and now she knows the cave perfectly so knowing how to move she gets straight to where she wants her. She takes her sister and does everything to bring her to safety but her dragon arrives and this time he isn’t willing to let her go.
Elodie, however, has decided that she wants to explain the whole truth to the dragon and says that she, like the other girls who came before her, was not descendants of royal blood at all but poor victims of an evil deception on the part of the king and queen that rather than sacrificing their daughters they took poor girls, married them to their son, and then sacrificed them by feeding them to the dragon. The dragon had established this pact with the kingdom to avenge the killing of his three cubs killed by men as soon as they were born. However, when the mother dragon comes to discover the truth everything changes. Elodie, who had almost managed to kill the monster, finally decides to save him by using the healing fireflies to heal him.
And in the end, both Elodie, her sister, and the dragon are saved. In the end, Elodie returns to the royal palace and interrupts yet another wedding of the prince with what would have been the third victim of the dragon. She saves the girl by making her escape and makes all the other subjects run away too. Elodie confronts the queen telling her that it was the end of their story, and the dragon arrives ready to destroy everything. The queen and her family are killed as well as the kingdom which is set on fire. Eldoie and the dragon become allies and she, her stepmother, and her sister decide to govern the people together with the help of the dragon.
