Like most slapped-together contemporary fantasy films, Damsel (debuting Friday on Netflix) offers a fully digital deluge of earthly elements and fantastical creatures. Leading lady Millie Bobby Brown’s hit Netflix series Stranger Things is also full of such fakery, but she remains a sturdy emotional anchor against its steadily increasing onslaught of pixels.

Watching Brown apologize to pleasantly phosphorescent slugs that aren’t really there in Damsel reinforces that Brown’s talent sparks toward interaction rather than isolation. It’s a bad move to wall Brown off alone in such a remedial, rinse-repeat tale — with ceaseless loops of her Elodie escaping a scary dragon and her solace disrupted by the dragon getting the drop on her again.

Perhaps Damsel would have been better off as a pluralized story placing two more leading lady personalities in the same predicament and letting them all play off one another. Then again, if Damsel — the first in 13 years from director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) — leaves Hollywood staples like Angela Bassett, Robin Wright and Ray Winstone in distress for its supporting roles, the idea of three leads might cause this tale triple trouble.

“There are many stories of chivalry where the heroic knight saves the damsel in distress,” Elodie says in an opening voiceover. “This is not one of them.” Beyond Elodie’s ability to split wood and solve puzzles, Damsel anonymizes her aptitude for adventure; indeed, there is far more shrieking from Elodie than a voice given to who she truly is. Instead, the script by Dan Mazeau (Fast X) swiftly whisks Elodie off to the kingdom of Aurea for an arranged marriage meant to forestall financial ruin for her father (Winstone) and stepmother (Bassett).

Aurea’s prince (Nick Robinson) seems nice enough; his two perfunctory traits are riding horses and wishing to see the world. But Aurea’s queen (Wright) turns a noticeably cold shoulder to the prospect of celebrating with her in-laws, Elodie isn’t the only newcomer checking out views from Aurea’s high towers, and what is up with all that nighttime fire on the mountain?

Soon enough, Elodie finds herself in a struggle to survive Aurea’s burden of beast — a dragon to whom Shohreh Aghdashloo (24) lends her inimitable tones like a modern-day Mercedes McCambridge. Aghdashloo’s slow, seductive vocal scrape of gravel across silk is one of Damsel’s few bright spots, along with the occasional gnarliness of dragon roasting and ripping (including a move not unlike Vince Vaughn’s squishy finisher from Brawl in Cell Block 99). Still, its perpetual PG-13 plays well outside a truly blood-spattered sandbox and saps any sense of humor.

Damsel boasts technical credits from Zack Snyder’s longtime cinematographer (Larry Fong) and longtime Roland Emmerich cohort Patrick Tatopoulos on production design. But like Damsel’s characters and script, the visuals are indistinguishable from the generative fill of countless dragon fantasies. There is nothing tactile or transfixing about Elodie’s endless tunnel travels. 

Ultimately, this sluggish fable in a faraway land just makes you think more about the one you call home — particularly why, say, Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Deep Rising) couldn’t be sprung from director jail to infuse this with some semblance of sly, spry energy. As it stands, Damsel is simply a mother of drag-ons.