Stories form us. They shape our morals, sculpt our vision of love and map the paths in our lives. For centuries, Western culture and its stories have fed us a narrow vision of the “happy end.” From the Shakespearean comedies To Disney Fairy TalesThe sign of a life that has been well lived is so often a woman standing by a man who promises to obey and be sealed with wedding bells. The well -worn formula has given comfort, but it has also maintained a system that suffocates the imagination and leaves some room for other visions of fulfillment.
Julia Jackman’s second has “100 nights of hero” is a brilliant disprove to that tradition: a layered, playful and gripping reminder that stories themselves can be resistance.
Adapted from Isabel Greenberg’s award -winning graphic novel, The film is already twice full of history. Greenberg’s book took inspiration from “Thousand and A Nights”, the cornerstone of the Islamic Golden Age where Sheherazade is married to a man who kills his wives one day after marriage, but brilliantly manages to stay alive by telling him such engaging stories every night that he can not bear to end her life and cease to hear more about them.
Jackman keeps that legacy intact, and similarly, the romantic story turns by not starting with flirtation or longing, but with a wedding. Cherries (Maika Monroe) comes into marital brilliant in white, her desolate tape to Jerome (Amir El-Masry), a man who is rich and stylish but also a sociopath with bad breath. Jerome refuses to complete the marriage, judgmental Cherry to fail to give an heir and suffer from the same unclear fate as Janet the barren, Sara, the unbelief and Nadia lesbians. The story tells what Cherry already feels: the consequences of Jerome cruelty will never be his to bear.
Tapped in a gilded cage, Cherry finds his only comfort in his maid, hero (Emma Corrin). Their relationship, silent at first, becomes more urgent when Jerome leaves for an extended trip and leaves Cherry in the company of his boorish friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine). Manfred, fresh from murdering his wife for assumed infidelity, goes with Jerome when he explained that there are “no good women.” The couple makes a bet: Jerome will leave to take care of certain business issues for 100 nights and Manfred will try to seduce Cherry. If she resists, she lives. If she facilitates, she perish and Manfred wins Jerome’s Castle. The set can easily slide into gloomy melodrama, but Jackman adds it with a pop-tastic fun.
The hero is not aware of the venture but knows that something is wrong and protects Cherry the only way she can: by telling stories. Every night she releases the story of pink (pop star Charli XCX, in a surprising subtle and effective turn) and her two sisters, women who defied patriarchal expectations and endure the consequences. The parallels between the stories are more than narrative gamesmanship; They deepen each other. Through Rosa’s rebellion, Cherry glimpses the opportunity to resist his own destiny. Storytelling not only becomes diversion but a weapon, a way to survive, and – most moving – a road for Cherry to discover her real desires.
About themes let melancholy, Jackman ensures that the execution is never dour. The film lives with stylistic playfulness. Visually, it occupies a world that is both medieval and futuristic, equal parts lit manuscripts, haute couture track and neon soaked dream image soaked in “bisexual lighting.” Each composition bathes cherries and hero in lush shades that reflect their growing intimacy. Costume is another triumph: Cherry and Hero’s Headpieces are folded with precision of origami, while the ornate masks in Birdman’s followers look like they have been picked directly from an ornate fairy tales rarely brought life with such Aplomb in an independent movie. The tactile pleasure with these details anchors the imagination of material beauty.
Performances in the film are uniformly strong, but Emma Corrin appears as the film’s Linchpin. Known for their fine -tuned depictions of heart damage and anxietyThey reveal here a surprising gift to comedy. Thanks to the film’s fast editing, Corrins Deadpan reactions to men’s pompous Bluster -land as perfectly timed punchlines. In the meantime, Galitzine delivers Manfred as a cursed-Himbo parody of the Bodice ripper archetype, forever Fluds his bloody upper body while they proclaim that men just want women who are “beautiful, chaste, good at listening and fixing socks … interested in maps, Falconry, chess, etc. The line is absurd, but it is also depressing recognizable for anyone who has spent some time on a dating app, and Jackman twists both laughter and moan from the moment.
Monroe, commissioned to embody Cherry’s transformation, provides a silent impactful performance that blooms to something brilliant when her band with hero strengthens. Their relationship, tentative, intimate and tangled, remains long after the satirical skewer of male buffoonery has faded. It gives the film its real banking heart, which ensures that its feminist references are not only thematic window associations, but lived experience within the story.
Technically, the film is not without shortcomings. Some sequences feel hurried, some satirical dialogue is a little too on the nose and a special effect around the climax lacks polish from the production design elsewhere. These deficiencies also have a charm about them. They emphasize the film’s independent spirit, its refusal to conform to the homogenized car of so much of the cinema’s Esa. Jackman is less interested in flawless spectacle than in emotional and thematic resonance, and on that front more than delivers.
What makes the work remarkable is its sincerity. In a cinematic landscape that is increasingly dominated by algorithm -driven similarity, this film stands out for its tangled originality. It manifest itself in its singularity and empathy, in radical power of story: to distract tyrants, to strengthen the silent, imagine new future. The act of telling a story in itself becomes an act of survival and resistance. That message, formulated through Cherry and Hero’s connection, reason far beyond the screen.
At the end, you not only feel maintained, but strengthened. Jackman’s film is a gratifying evidence of independence, creativity and the lasting necessity of stories. It proves that happy endings need not be in line with a hundred -year -old formulas, and that love, whether romantic, platonic, queer or fleeting can be as complicated and wonderful as any of the stories we tell.
This is a movie of rare joy and spirit, and one that deserves to be celebrated as both a feminist fairy tale and a manifesto that will inspire a number of future stories.
Rating: A-
“100 Nights of Hero” premiered at 2025 Venice Film festival. IFC will release the movie in theaters on Friday December 5.
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