Rowan’s notes
The setup is pure fairy tale: a princess, a royal wedding, an ancient pact. Then the trailer flips it — the wedding is really a sacrifice, the bride ends up in a dragon’s cave, and nobody is coming to help.
Millie Bobby Brown spends most of the trailer climbing, running and squeezing through rock, which is a refreshing change from princesses who mostly wait. The dragon is kept in shadow, glimpsed through smoke and firelight, and the voice — Shohreh Aghdashloo — does the rest.
It isn’t my favourite film in the catalogue, but the cave sequences are genuinely tense, and I will always respect a story that makes its dragon clever instead of just big.
Stills from the trailer
What to watch for
- The lighting in the caves: almost everything is lit by fire.
- How little of the dragon you actually get to see.
- The final beat, which tells you exactly what kind of story this is.
