Le-Van Kiet’s 2022 action fantasy keeps the oldest princess setup — a tower, a refused suitor, a kingdom at stake — and rebuilds it as a fight from the top of a castle to the bottom, with Joey King doing the fighting.

The Princess starts from the most familiar picture in the fairy-tale catalogue: a young woman locked at the top of a tower. What changes is why she is up there and what she does about it. Joey King plays a princess who has refused to marry Julius, a nobleman with his eye on her father’s crown, and who wakes up a prisoner in the tower of the family castle while Julius and a company of hired mercenaries take the place by force. Nobody is riding to the rescue. If the royal family is going to get out of this, the help has to come from the top of the tower, and it has to come down one floor at a time.

That is the whole engine of the 2022 film directed by Le-Van Kiet: a siege told from the inside, over a single stretch of hours, in a single location. Dominic Cooper plays Julius, the rejected suitor who means to marry into the throne or simply take it, whichever comes first. The king, played by Ed Stoppard, and the queen, played by Alex Reid, are prisoners in their own hall, and the princess’s younger sister, Violet (Katelyn Rose Downey), is the lever Julius is happy to pull. Olga Kurylenko plays Moira, the enforcer at Julius’s side, while Veronica Ngô plays Linh, the fighter who trained the princess in secret, a bond the film fills in through flashbacks that cut against the present-day assault.

The screenplay is credited to Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton, and the film was produced by 20th Century Studios with Original Film, the company of Neal H. Moritz, the producer behind the Fast & Furious franchise. Moritz produced alongside Toby Jaffe and Derek Kolstad, and the last of those names matters more than a line in the credits suggests: Kolstad is the writer who created John Wick, the 2014 film that reset what a mid-budget American action movie was expected to look like, with long, legible fights and a hero whose story is told almost entirely through what they do with their hands.

The Princess never went to cinemas. It premiered on Hulu in the United States on 1 July 2022, part of the run of mid-sized genre pictures that Disney routed straight to its streaming services after absorbing the old Fox studio. That route shapes what kind of film this is. It is not a tentpole fairy tale with a merchandising plan behind it, but a compact studio genre exercise built around one star, one location and one premise that can be summed up in a sentence, the kind of project that used to be called a programmer and now lives on a platform home page.

For Le-Van Kiet, it was the biggest Hollywood production of his career at that point. The Vietnamese-American filmmaker’s best-known earlier work is Furie (Hai Phượng, 2019), a Vietnamese action thriller built around a mother tearing through a trafficking ring to get her daughter back, which starred and was produced by Veronica Ngô and became a major box-office success at home. Kiet also directed The Requin, a survival thriller with Alicia Silverstone released the same year as The Princess. Bringing Ngô into the cast reads as a deliberate thread from Furie: the same director and lead fighter, now inside a European-style castle rather than the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.

For Joey King, the role was a change of gear. She had spent the previous years as the face of Netflix’s The Kissing Booth trilogy and had earned an Emmy nomination for The Act (2019), the true-crime series in which she played Gypsy Rose Blanchard. That same summer of 2022 she also appeared in David Leitch’s Bullet Train, opposite Brad Pitt. The Princess asked something different of her: to carry an action film as its physical lead, in a premise built around fights she has to win to reach the next floor.

Her opposition comes with long genre résumés. Dominic Cooper had played Jesse Custer in the series Preacher, the young Howard Stark in the Marvel films and both Uday Hussein and his body double in The Devil’s Double; a villainous aristocrat with a sword is well within his range. Olga Kurylenko brought action credentials from Quantum of Solace, Oblivion and Marvel’s Black Widow, and Veronica Ngô had followed Furie with roles in Bright, The Old Guard and Star Wars: The Last Jedi. On paper, it is a cast assembled by people who know who can sell a fight.

The structure belongs to a well-worn line of action cinema: one hero, one building, a ladder of enemies between them and the exit. Die Hard set the template in an office tower in 1988; Gareth Evans’s The Raid stripped it to the bone in a Jakarta apartment block in 2011. The Princess swaps the skyscraper for a castle and the cop for a royal heir, and the fairy-tale tower gives the formula a ready-made vertical map. The princess begins at the top and the goal is at the bottom, which is the exact inverse of the usual climb.

The film also sits inside a broader rethinking of the princess story itself. Disney spent the 2010s reworking its own heroines, from Brave (2012) to Frozen (2013), around women who refuse the marriage plot. The Princess takes that refusal as its starting point rather than its conclusion, and makes it bloody. Two years later, Netflix’s Damsel, with Millie Bobby Brown, ran a similar inversion with a dragon instead of a mercenary army, which says something about how much mileage studios saw in the idea of the fairy-tale heroine who saves herself.

Behind the camera, the credits list Lorenzo Senatore as cinematographer and Alex Fenn as editor, while the score is by Natalie Holt, the British composer who had just come off Marvel’s Loki series. For a film whose appeal rests on fight choreography, the editor and the stunt team carry a heavy share of the work: in this lineage of action film, the question is always whether the audience can follow who is hitting whom, and where everybody is in the building.

Reception at the time of release was split, with King’s commitment to the role the element most often singled out and the script the most often questioned. That is a common pattern for single-premise action films, which tend to live or die on whether the set-pieces justify the stretches of plot between them, and on whether the flashbacks earn their place or simply delay the next fight. The film runs on the bet that a clear premise and a committed lead are enough to hold a viewer from the top of the tower to the gates.

The Princess is best approached as what it set out to be: a lean genre piece from a director who arrived with an action calling card, built around a star who wanted to prove she could lead one. Whether the fairy-tale costume adds anything to the siege formula, or simply dresses it up, is the open question it leaves behind, and the answer will depend on how much a viewer enjoys watching a familiar structure turned upside down, one floor at a time.