Amir El-Masry is the lucky owner of one of the great faces in modern cinema, and he got to show it off not once but twice at this year’s London Film Festival. Unfortunately in neither case was it shown off to his best advantage. Giant managed somehow not to be about what it’s about, and 100 Nights of Hero wastes a fascinating cast and some of the strongest production design in a very long time on a reactionary plot. It’s meant to be a takedown of patriarchal religion and a celebration of female intelligence, but it’s actually a guide for how straight women ingratiate themselves with male power by sacrificing any and all women who threaten that power. The only people who will want to watch this have something the matter with them.
That being said, it looks fantastic, and Sofia Sacomani’s production design, Susie Coulthard’s costumes and the editing by Oona Flaherty and Amélie Labrèche builds a setting which is both recognisably ours and recognisably not. Under a voiceover by Felicity Jones, Cherry (Maika Monroe) lives in a world where female literacy is forbidden and the only value women have is in their fertility. Kind of like an afterschool version of The Handmaid’s Tale, but in an English castle, with religious iconography based on birds. Cherry is married to Jerome (Mr. El-Masry) who has not yet consummated their marriage, despite the local religious elders providing Cherry with a deadline to become pregnant or get killed. Jerome immediately arranges a long business trip but invites a friend named Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine, who perfectly understood the assignment) to stay over while he’s gone. He does this for a bet over whether Manfred can sleep with Cherry. If Manfred sleeps with Cherry, he gets the castle. If Cherry sleeps with Manfred she’ll be executed for being a loose woman, and if she doesn’t get pregnant she’ll be executed anyway, so either way Jerome wins. It’s an appalling dilemma that Cherry doesn’t know how to handle, but fortunately she has a maid named Hero (Emma Corrin, more on whom later). Among her vast array of talents, Hero has a Scheherazade-level gift for telling stories, though attention spans are obviously not what they were. To divert Manfred’s attentions from Cherry’s bedroom she begins spinning a tale about a woman named Rosa (Charli XCX), who was not a witch. But as everyone, including the castle guards, gets invested in what Hero is talking about, things begin to change.
Mx. Corrin, who I have seen a few times on the London stage, has an exceptional physical frailty that is somehow entrancing. You feel drawn to and protective of them, and utterly beguiled by anything they care to say. This is the perfect actor for the role of someone who will so delightfully prevent you from having sex that you won’t mind in the least, and Mx. Corrin manages to make this task seem like a joy instead of a desperate play for time. But even as Manfred strides around shirtless, Cherry remains idiotically useless and the scenes with Rosa emphasise Charli XCX’s south Asian heritage in ways we have not seen from her before, it’s painfully clear that director Julia Jackman, who also adapted the script from a graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, aimed to ingratiate herself to male power instead of making a movie that believed its own point.
100 Nights of Hero’s only idea of female power – and trying extremely hard to avoid spoilers here – is the one which enables the worst kind of straight women to turn into hateful, violent monsters. Let’s say that the only solidarity shown between women is in the worst possible circumstances for the least possible purpose. The plot twists have been a hateful cliché since the beginning of cinema and it’s shocking that a movie aimed at modern LGBTQ+ audiences has repeated those clichés, seemingly without thought.
This goes beyond a waste of the many talents involved into an insult. When I say insult, 100 Nights of Hero is like the kiddie manual for the kind of spitting sexist hatred that has bought Great Britain the nickname TERF Island. Why did so many interesting women agree to work on something this hateful? Because let me be perfectly clear: 100 Nights of Hero has dressed itself up as an empowering story while actually being the worst kind of throwback. It’s an embarrassment for all involved, including the people who watched it, and deserves to sink into oblivion as soon as possible.
100 Nights of Hero recently played at the London Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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