Arabian Nights, an expansive collection of Islamic folktales, is as influential to contemporary literature and pop culture as the works of Shakespeare—an expansive text whose storytelling innovations have proved formative far beyond the fantasy genre. But instead of dozens of stories told across One Thousand and One Nights, how about a single tale across a hundred, acted out by a distractingly miscast Charli XCX as interludes between a half-baked regal love triangle which feels straight out of some budding teenage author’s Wattpad drafts? 100 Nights of Hero is adapted from a 2016 graphic novel of the same name by Isabel Greenberg, and writer-director Julia Jackman’s interpretation feels less like a radical reimagining of a foundational work of literature than a post-Bridgerton romance that lazily riffs on the many tropes it initiated, with an overarching feminist message obvious to the point of being condescending to its audience.
It’s a fairly odd message considering that One Thousand and One Nights has long been the subject of scholarly analysis for the extent of its feminism; women are brutally murdered in the wrap-around story until Scheherazade opts to spend her days filibustering, stopping her husband’s onslaught through captivating him with storytelling. It’s a dark invocation of a patriarchal society more effective than Jackman’s film, which treats the use of women as property––banned from reading, writing, and much more––so flippantly it’s a surprise that the third act even bothers to circle back around to include a broad empowerment moral.
Set in a heightened medieval society, the drama stems from failure in the marriage between Jerome (Amir El-Masry) and his long-suffering wife Cherry (Maika Monroe), who has been handed all the blame for their lack of children—that they’ve never had sex because Jerome is living in a glass closet is an open secret many around them choose to ignore. His close friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) arrives at their sprawling manor claiming that he could easily bed Cherry, and is given 100 nights to make good on his dare. Instead of instantly leading her to the boudoir, however, Manfred’s attempts keep being thwarted via the presence of Cherry’s servant Hero (Emma Corrin), who keeps interrupting to tell the myth of Rosa the Cunning (XCX), stalling Manfred’s attempt to make good on his bet.
The gradual retelling of this story––an anti-patriarchal reimagining of an in-universe folk tale––brings Cherry and Hero closer together, although you’d be hard-pressed to detect any spark of chemistry between the two performers. It’s a romance forged purely because the forbidden same-sex love story (Corrin is a non-binary actor, but their character is identified in the screenplay as female) is a trope of this current wave of quasi-erotic fantasy; there’s no beating heart to make the relationship register as anything other than an on-the-nose statement against patriarchy. And this would be fine if the film were either funnier in its genre parody or smarter in its subversion of centuries-old tropes––the obviousness of both makes for a flat experience, where more care has been taken in building the style of this world than in fleshing out the people who occupy it. There are wonderfully lavish costumes in almost every frame here; what does that matter if I’m uninterested in the characters wearing them? In the source material, the relationship between Cherry and Hero is already in full swing when the story begins, adding a greater emotional weight in the maid’s attempts to intervene in the antagonist’s womanizing ways. In a movie where every constituent element suggests a visual conceit tacked onto a Pinterest board, it plays like a shallow attempt to shake up a conservative genre, no earnest feeling between the characters offered onscreen.
Jackman’s previous film, Bonus Track, was a grounded coming-of-age tale, so I can’t fault her preoccupation with intricately designing this world. But there’s no unique artistic identity on display here, something made plainly apparent by how she frames characters in ways heavily, painfully indebted to Wes Anderson, where carefully calibrated camera movements clash with choreography from the actors designed to look like mistakes, even though they’ve had all spontaneity removed from them by design. It’s as empty a utilization of his style as the TikTok trend which stripped his work of all substance, and when filming on location instead of the same elaborately constructed sound stages he uses, it appears every bit the poor imitation as a teenager trying to reconstruct the artifice of his films with only a smartphone.
Running at a slim 92 minutes, 100 Nights of Hero was clearly never intending to match the sprawling scale of its literary inspiration––but that doesn’t absolve it of inefficiencies, modernizing its source in a way that’ll make you glad we still have the classics to hold onto.
100 Nights of Hero opens in theaters on Friday, December 5.