In “100 Nights of Hero,” stories are a curse and a super power, a death sentence and perhaps the only way to be truly free. Flawed but endearing, this feminist fable is about how women hold onto one another and find agency in storytelling within an oppressive society.
Directed by Julia Jackman and based on a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, the movie takes place on an alternate planet with two extra moons but a familiar sense of repression. After an aristocratic bride named Cherry (Maika Monroe) fails to produce an heir, she is given a 100-day deadline to conceive with her husband, Jerome (Amir El-Masry), who refuses to consummate their marriage.
Fleeing his duty, Jerome leaves his wife with a smug and princely friend named Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), who is intent on seducing Cherry but is stymied by her maid, Hero (Emma Corrin). To thwart Manfred, Hero weaves a tale about three sisters (one of whom is played by Charli XCX) who must keep their literacy a secret in a world where women are barred from reading. It’s a story that begins to bend time and reality, as cycles of nights dreamily flit by across its telling.
Jackman crafts an amusing universe, where the stodginess of archaic times and values are disarmed by magical whimsy and wry irony. But its borrowed sensibility — a merging of Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” and “The Favourite” — often falls just short of the vision it’s reaching for, and its ideas around feminist freedom have a storybook patness. Still, there’s just enough style and slyness to momentarily whisk one away.
100 Nights of Hero Rated PG-13 for sexual material, some bloody images and language. Running time 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.
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