Tales form us. They mould our morality, sculpt our imaginative and prescient of affection, and chart the trajectories of our lives. For hundreds of years, Western tradition and its tales have fed us a slender imaginative and prescient of the “glad ending.” From Shakespearean comedies to Disney fairy tales, the signal of a life effectively lived is so typically a lady standing by a person, vowing to obey and sealed with wedding ceremony bells. That well-worn system has offered consolation, however it has additionally upheld a system that stifles creativeness and leaves little room for different visions of success.
Julia Jackman’s sophomore function “100 Nights of Hero” is a luminous rebuttal to that custom: a layered, playful, and poignant reminder that tales themselves may be acts of resistance.
Tailored from Isabel Greenberg’s award-winning graphic novel, the movie is already doubly steeped in historical past. Greenberg’s ebook drew inspiration from “One Thousand and One Nights,” that cornerstone of the Islamic Golden Age through which Sheherazade is married to a person who kills his wives a day publish matrimony, however ingeniously manages to remain alive by telling him such partaking tales every evening that he can’t bear to finish her life and stop listening to extra of them.
Jackman retains that inheritance intact, equally flipping the romantic story script by starting not with flirtation or longing, however with a marriage. Cherry (Maika Monroe) enters matrimony resplendent in white, her destiny tied to Jerome (Amir El-Masry), a person who’s rich and good-looking but in addition a sociopath with unhealthy breath. Jerome refuses to consummate the wedding, dooming Cherry to fail to supply an inheritor and undergo the identical ignominious destiny suffered by Janet the Barren, Sara the Untrue, and Nadia the Lesbian. The narration tells us what Cherry already senses: the results of Jerome’s cruelty won’t ever be his to bear.
Trapped in a gilded cage, Cherry finds her solely solace in her maid, Hero (Emma Corrin). Their relationship, quiet at first, grows extra pressing when Jerome departs for a protracted journey and leaves Cherry within the firm of his boorish pal Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine). Manfred, recent from murdering his spouse for supposed infidelity, joins Jerome in declaring there are “no good ladies.” The pair make a wager: Jerome will depart to take care of some enterprise affairs for 100 nights and Manfred will try and seduce Cherry. If she resists, she lives. If she succumbs, she perishes and Manfred wins Jerome’s fort. The set-up may simply slip into grim melodrama, however Jackman infuses it with a pop-tastic enjoyable.
Hero is unaware of the wager however is aware of one thing is amiss and protects Cherry the one manner she will be able to: by telling tales. Every evening, she unfurls the saga of Rosa (pop star Charli XCX, in a shocking refined and efficient flip) and her two sisters, ladies who defied patriarchal expectations and endured the results. The parallels between the tales are greater than narrative gamesmanship; they deepen one another. By way of Rosa’s riot, Cherry glimpses the potential for resisting her personal destiny. Storytelling turns into not mere diversion however a weapon, a way of survival, and — most movingly — an avenue for Cherry to find her true wishes.
If the themes sound melancholy, Jackman ensures the execution isn’t dour. The movie is alive with stylistic playfulness. Visually, it occupies a world that’s each medieval and futuristic, equal elements illuminated manuscript, high fashion runway, and neon-soaked dreamscape drenched in “bisexual lighting.” Every composition bathes Cherry and Hero in lush hues that mirror their rising intimacy. Costuming is one other triumph: Cherry and Hero’s headpieces fold with the precision of origami, whereas the ornate masks of the Birdman’s followers appear like they’ve been plucked straight from an ornately illustrated fairy story hardly ever delivered to life with such aplomb in an impartial movie. The tactile pleasure of those particulars anchors the fantasy in materials magnificence.
Performances within the movie are uniformly sturdy, however Emma Corrin emerges because the movie’s linchpin. Recognized for his or her finely tuned portrayals of heartbreak and anguish, they reveal right here a shocking reward for comedy. Because of the movie’s brisk modifying, Corrin’s deadpan reactions to the boys’s pompous bluster land as completely timed punchlines. Galitzine, in the meantime, delivers Manfred as a cursed-himbo parody of the bodice-ripper archetype, ceaselessly flaunting his bloodied torso whereas proclaiming that males solely need ladies who’re “stunning, chaste, good at listening and mending socks … considering maps, falconry, chess, and so on., however clearly not too good at them.” The road is absurd, however it’s additionally depressingly recognizable for anybody who has spent any time on a courting app, and Jackman wrings each laughter and groans from the second.
Monroe, tasked with embodying Cherry’s transformation, offers a quietly affecting efficiency that blossoms into one thing radiant as her bond with Hero strengthens. Their relationship, tentative, intimate, and defiant, lingers lengthy after the satirical skewering of male buffoonery has light. It offers the movie with its true beating coronary heart, guaranteeing its feminist credentials aren’t simply thematic window dressing, however lived expertise throughout the narrative.
Technically, the movie will not be with out flaws. Some sequences really feel hurried, some satirical dialogue is a bit of too on the nostril and a particular impact across the climax lacks the polish of the manufacturing design elsewhere. But even these imperfections have a attraction about them. They underscore the movie’s impartial spirit, its refusal to evolve to the homogenized bilge of a lot of cinema’s aeshetic. Jackman is much less considering flawless spectacle than in emotional and thematic resonance, and on that entrance the movie greater than delivers.
What makes the work outstanding is its sincerity. In a cinematic panorama more and more dominated by algorithm-driven sameness, this movie stands out for its defiant originality. It revels in its singularity and empathy, in radical energy of storytelling: to distract tyrants, to empower the silenced, to think about new futures. The act of telling a narrative turns into, in itself, an act of survival and resistance. That message, articulated by Cherry and Hero’s connection, resonates far past the display.
By the top, one feels not simply entertained, however invigorated. Jackman’s movie is a joyous testomony to independence, creativity, and the enduring necessity of tales. It proves that glad endings needn’t conform to centuries-old formulation, and that love, be it romantic, platonic, queer, or fleeting may be as complicated and wondrous as any of the tales we inform.
This can be a movie of uncommon pleasure and spirit, and one which deserves to be celebrated as each a feminist fairytale and a manifesto that can encourage a myriad of future tales.
Grade: A-
“100 Nights of Hero” premiered on the 2025 Venice Movie Pageant. IFC will launch the movie in theaters on Friday, December 5.
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