100 Nights of Hero
First screened and reviewed in January 2026
Director: Julia Jackman. Cast: Maika Monroe, Emma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Amir El-Masry, Charli XCX, Olivia D'Lima, Kerena Jagpal, Clare Perkins, Tom Stourton, Richard E. Grant, Felicity Jones. Screenplay: Julia Jackman (based on the comic book by Isabel Greenberg). In Brief:
Evident creativity. Merry confusion of bright and dark notes, even if core feels hollow. Final act disheveled.
VOR:③
Unlikely to leave a huge footprint, but in its sturdiest and even its weakest elements, a welcome bellwether of feminist pop cinema outside the box.
What if you were on your way to start filming a queer feminist Hammer horror flick filtered through the Scheherazade myth but stopped off en route to set to take in a matinée of Barbie? You might wind up, half-luckily, with 100 Nights of Hero, in which Maika Monroe of Longlegs and It Follows plays Cherry, a royal beauty in an unconsummated marriage. Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), the ostensibly strapping bro/rival of her gay, crown-wearing husband, makes one of those only-in-the-movies bets that he can pop this Cherry, save the kingdom from heirlessness, and win himself a new home with a dope moat. But to do so, he'll have to get past Cherry's unimpressed, Danvers-adjacent maid Hero (Emma Corrin), a vigorous reader and writer in this parodically patriarchal principality that denies women both of those privileges, plus many others. Hero inclines toward long, Angela Carter-ish, once-upon-a-time oratory as a cock-blocking scheme against Manfred and as a way of transparently nudging Cherry to look her way instead, even if the film hedges a bit on who is wise to that latter agenda, and how soon, and how enthusiastically.
It's all perfectly diverting, even if the narrative is less elaborately imagined than some of the visual elements, from the Tarsem Lite costumes to the Crayola palette to some of the pointed props that serve as barbed punchlines: e.g., a stained-glass icon of some queen of the past, executed by her husband for producing no prince and depicted with a black eye from one of her husband's beatings. Writer-director Julia Jackman manages to wring some laughs from elements like this that might've landed quite differently, which suggests a gift worth exploring. That said, 100 Nights of Hero could probably do with some sharper edges and, at least at well-timed intervals, a greater sense of danger. As is, it seems designed for 14-year-old girlbosses-in-waiting whose parents are trying to keep them from Poor Things. I guess someone should feed that audience even if it's a mystery in the current film economy how this movie would find them. The story-within-a-story where Charli XCX appears as an unhappily married-off maiden, dragged away from her garden and her hurdy-gurdy and much missed by her feisty sisters, translates as 50% narrative crux and 50% alibi for buying web ads on Spotify.
Amid colorful surroundings and despite moments of comic promise, Galitzine is a little drab as the prince; I wish his role were played by Amir El-Masry, the British/Egyptian actor cast instead as the feckless, club-hopping king, sending signals of under-exploited wit. It's nice to see Monroe sprung from all the terrible things that happen to her in horror movies and in that currently inescapable trailer for yet another Colleen Hoover adaptation, but not for the first time she feels a little under-charged as a performer, with an inexplicably flat American accent amid all the Ren-fair Britishisms. 100 Nights of Hero starts with a Richard E. Grant cameo and ends with one by producer Felicity Jones, and that's exactly the movie's temperature and trajectory. You get excited by the early prospect of devilish irony and charismatic insider/outsider pizzazz and end with a film that's reasonably polished but a bit dutiful, unlikely to ignite much passion.
For the good of film culture, I wish 100 Nights of Hero had caught on a little more, even if I can't manage a full-throated recommendation. Not one of my two dozen, movie-mad Letterboxd follows caught it. I absolutely don't blame them, especially having waited myself till streaming, but it's rare for all of us to miss something that seems off the beaten path, and I worry about this type of unicorn-y project dying out entirely. That Hero and the equally wild-yet-somehow-rote Dust Bunny managed fairly wide theatrical releases, even in the arid valley of early, pre-Avatar December, is a feat that's soon to be as rare as a fairy-tale kingdom with a lesbian queen. Those brave if unremunerative runs are clues that at least a few higher-ups rightfully saw some promise in these elaborate visions—cuckoo, both of them, albeit very storyboard-y and without the virtues of being outright nuts. I imagine we're talking a small handful of well-placed champions in both cases, some of them since marched off the studio-executive cliff. Even the one or two who survived probably won't return to the greenlighting suite anytime soon. Grade:C+
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
