The Princess (2022)

The Princess arrives with a thesis stapled to its forehead and a sword in its hand. A young royal declines to marry the sociopath her father has selected, is locked in a tower for her trouble, and spends the rest of the runtime carving a path back to her family. The argument is not buried. A woman's right to choose her own life is the plot, the climax, and the closing line of dialogue, handed down as a royal decree. It is a lean, efficient piece of business, and it knows precisely what it is selling.

The delivery shows a little restraint. Most of the instruction happens through choreography, throat-cutting, and one satisfying decapitation, which is a more agreeable method of persuasion than a monologue. The final decree lands with a thud, but it is a single thud. Joey King anchors the proceedings with credible physicality, and the supporting cast includes Veronica Ngo as Linh alongside a Vietnamese director in Le-Van Kiet, though this diversity functions as texture. The film never asks us to dwell on it, and it never becomes the subject.

What the film declines to do is nearly as instructive. There is no romantic subplot of any orientation, no engagement with racial identity, no economic critique (the villain's grievance is with peace, not with markets), no climate anxiety, no body-positive framing, no neurodivergent character, and no reworking of actual history, since the kingdom is invented wholesale. The patriarchy is the only system under indictment, and it is dispatched with a blade. The whole enterprise survived on Hulu for less than a year before being pulled, which feels like an honest verdict on a film that said its piece and then went quiet.