Arete doesn't want to be saved, and the film has no interest in saving her. Instead, it watches her choose herself, slowly and quietly, while everyone around her keeps trying to write her story for her. The pacing feels patient because the story itself is patient, refusing to rush a princess who has spent her whole life waiting to move. By the end, she doesn't defeat a villain or claim a throne, she just walks away from the tower and into the world, and that choice costs everything and solves nothing, and it's the most honest thing any fairy tale has ever let a woman do.

Princess Arete is kept in a castle tower by her father, spending her days gazing at the world beyond her window and sometimes slipping out to watch ordinary people at work. Meanwhile, the kingdom's knights compete for her hand and the throne by hunting down powerful magical objects left by a long-vanished race of sorcerers. Arete wants no part of it. She dreams of meeting common folk and seeing faraway lands she knows only from the books hidden under her bed. Then the sorcerer Boax arrives in a wondrous flying machine, proposing to marry her and remake her into a proper princess. A fantasy adventure film.