Damsel (2018)

In the middle of the Utah desert, two men sat at a peculiarly situated stagecoach stop.  The younger man (David Zellner) said he was heading West to make a new start.  The older man, a preacher (Robert Forester), scoffed at that idea.  The West would be just as bad as where he had come from, though perhaps bad in a new way.  He had enough of the West and was returning to the East.  The old man grew impatient for the stagecoach.    Eventually, he stripped off most of his clothes, handed his tattered bible to the other man, and marched into the desert in his long johns.

At a barn dance, Samuel Alabaster (Robert Pattinson) and Penelope (Mia Wasikowska) were partners with wide grins.  The music was energetic and the dancers stamped the ground like an Irish river dance.

On a lonely northwestern shore, a man rowed a boat a shore.  He unloaded a crate that contained a miniature horse!  The man was Samuel and the horse was Butterscotch.  He made his way to a town and sought Parson Henry.  He found the drunken Parson Henry on the beach.  Notably, Parson Henry proved to be the younger man from the stagecoach stop and he wore the preacher's clothes and carried his tattered bible.  Samuel hired him via telegram for unspecified purposes.  After making Parson Henry presentable, the pair rode into the wilderness.  Samuel eventually explained that Penelope was kidnapped and he was on a rescue mission.  As soon as she was safe, he wanted Parson Henry to marry them.

Billed as a dark comedy, there is precious little comedy to be had.  Here is a collection of motley characters who, once you get to know them, are mostly dislikeable or bad.  Parson Henry, who links the tale together, is a coward who has no direction.  He wants to latch onto something or someone.  So, he's a parasite?  Samuel is an unreliable source, painting a picture that isn't accurate.  Props to Pattinson for taking such a role and doing a great job in it, but Samuel gets less and less likeable as time goes on.  Penelope is a sympathetic character but fails to be likeable; she's a very masculine character, destroying all the men she encounters.

What was the point of this story?  Parson Henry is unchanged from when met at the stagecoach stop.  The other characters have been dislodged from the lives they had, but the future is unknown.  It's like a story about a house that burned down that ends with the family staring at the ashes before walking away.  Uh, okay.  Throughout the movie, there are bits that ruin the setting.  That stagecoach stop in the middle of the desert was one such instance.  There is litterally nothing else in sight and it isn't a crossroad.  How would the potential rider get to the stop?  When leaving the town, Samuel had a chicken in a birdcage on top of Butterscotch.  What's that about?  On their first night out, they eat the chicken and the birdcage is not seen again.  Oh, okay.

Hard pass on this one.  Zellner made a much better movie: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter.  Watch that instead.