BEDTIME STORIES

The Fantasy Movie Changing All the Rules—And Casting Charli XCX

With its lush costumes and copiously detailed setting, it’s a movie that must be seen to be believed.

We’re about due for some new vibes in the fantasy genre space.

With every streaming service and production company (and book publisher, for that matter) trying to find their next Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, it feels especially special when something slips past the soup of tropes and clichés and gritty medieval realism and offers a glimpse into the worlds that a genre as all-encompassing as “fantasy” can include.

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100 Nights of Hero, the new feature by director Julia Jackman in theaters Nov. 5, is such a movie, a fantasy film unlike anything else, that feels like it crash-landed here from another world.

The thing is, to say that 100 Nights of Hero is “unlike anything else” is kind of inaccurate: the film, like its source material, is more of a collage of fairy tales, storytelling tropes, and cultural remnants from our own world, remixed together into something heretofore unseen. Graphic novelist Isabel Greenberg, whose 2016 book provides the outline for this film, takes the familiar—a rigid patriarchal society, a Shakespearean marriage farce, a storyteller tasked with spinning yarns every night—and turns them inside out, adding a bird mask here, an extra moon in the sky there.

Every shot contains something unexpected, strange, charming. The whole thing has an almost handmade quality, in a way that feels like you’re watching a play at a Renaissance faire, or, more appropriately, watching a master wordsmith spin a story from nothing.

That’s the basic plot of the movie: When young Cherry (scream queen Maika Monroe, more subdued here) is forced into marrying Jerome (Amir El-Masry), he refuses to consummate their relationship. Cherry is given the ultimatum that she must conceive a child within the next 100 days, or be put to death.

Her husband promptly leaves her on a faraway errand, but allows his Lothario friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) to stay on his estate, drunkenly wagering that his faithful wife won’t respond to any of Manfred’s advances. Thankfully, Cherry’s wellbeing is watched over by her maid Hero (Emma Corrin), who promises to distract Manfred with a story anytime Cherry needs help fending him off.

The bones of the story are inspired by the Arabian folktale collection One Thousand and One Nights, famously told by the wily Scheherazade to the murderous Persian King Shahryar. Corrin’s Hero displays that same courageous self-confidence that kept Scheherazade’s head on her shoulders, only this time around, her storytelling is in the service of her dearest friend (and perhaps more).

The narrative-within-the-narrative tells of a trio of women (including one Charli XCX, who proves herself a pretty good actress) who performed the forbidden act of reading, and were punished for it by the same male-driven society Cherry and Hero find themselves chafing against. The film uses folktales and the act of telling them as a form of revolution and cultural preservation. If there is such a thing as a “revisionist fantasy,” this is it.

Aside from its daringly definitive take on the prison of gender roles, the movie is, literally, a sight to behold. The action takes place within the walls of gilded countryside palaces, woodlands full of gnarled trees, beaches, and cliffsides where the wind whips the water. Actors don costumes that look like something Eiko Ishioka would have designed for a Tarsem Singh movie, with unexpected frills and wood-boned corsets and funny hats. And the movie does have that same flavor: a vision from a director determined to craft images that have never been crafted before.

The stylized, heightened worldbuilding is matched only by the winking way the narrative moves through every scene, throwing an archly satirical gaze at every turn of the plot. It is by turns sincere and sardonic, treating its characters with care and their societal structure with disdain (and throwing a little of that disdain towards the male characters as well).

It balances confidently between too sweet and too cold, playfully bending towards both but never slipping into cloying earnestness or grimdark realism. 100 Nights of Hero knows that fairy tales aren’t always nice, but they’re always fun to tell.

Emma Stefansky

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