Promising Young Woman (2020 | USA | 113 minutes | Emerald Fennell)
The opening scene of Promising Young Woman, the new, debut film from “Killing Eve” S2 showrunner Emerald Fennell, is one of the most exhilarating scenes I can remember seeing in a movie in the past few years. A bunch of bros are hanging around a bar, complaining about #MeToo, when they see Cassie (Carey Mulligan, in a delicious, star-making performance) who appears to have had about six too many drinks and every bit the hot mess (heavy emphasis on both “hot” and “mess”). One of the dudes (Adam Brody) goes in to approach Cassie and feign concern for her and offers to get her home safely. His name is Jerry and he wants you to know he’s not like the other guys, the guys who would take advantage of a drunk girl and equate intoxication with consent. But when Jerry and Cassie are in the Uber, Jerry suggests they go back to his place instead, where he gives Cassie more booze. The twist is that she’s actually stone-sober and he will think thrice before trying to pick up a clearly intoxicated woman again. What exactly happens is vague, just that things don’t work out as well as Jerry hoped and Cassie takes delicious vengeance on him. She’s next seen walking down a sidewalk barefoot, eating a hamburger, triumphantly. A poppy cover of “It’s Raining Men” plays. We don’t know if it’s blood or ketchup running down her arm, but it doesn’t matter. She has another name to write in her book and Jerry, presumably, learns his lesson.
If you hadn’t seen the trailer, you would have instantly recognized that this is a feminist revenge film. The visual style and color palate are fantastic, Carey Mulligan is outstanding as the lead, the music is well-chosen and well-placed, and I am 100% on board with the movie’s argument, that sexual assault can have debilitating consequences for the victims and the perpetrators are way too often allowed to get away with it, and those in power can perpetuate rape by looking the other way and discarding victims when it’s beneficial. And those guilty are mostly, but not exclusively, men.
When we learn more about Cassie, her rage becomes understandable and warranted. She dropped out of med school after her best friend and classmate was raped by one of the most popular students, everyone knew about it, and everyone failed her friend along the way and it led to her suicide. Cassie had the potential to be a doctor, but after that, she lost her ambition and became content working at a coffee shop by day and hunting predators at night. Her parents and her coffee shop manager (Laverne Cox, always a welcome presence) try to steer her towards a job that would better match her intellect and talents. She knows what she’s doing can put her in a lot of danger if she goes after the wrong guy, but doesn’t see any other way to channel her trauma. If the movie feels heavy-handed at times, it’s certainly justified.
Yet, for all of the things this movie does exceptionally well, and so much of the movie justifies its pre-release hype, it became more and more frustrating for me to watch because it felt like a great movie was on the verge of breaking free from a pretty good movie.
One thing I find to be a minor annoyance is that instead of referring to cliches when there’s nowhere else to go, there is a tendency to reference memes, as Promising Young Woman did with the Neal character, the second predator Cassie takes down. Played by Christopher “McLovin” Mintz-Plasse, he’s a so-called “nice guy,” and a coked-up wannabe novelist that, of course, loves David Foster Wallace. It’s a familiar shout out to anyone that has spent time on Book Twitter. As New York Magazine put it in 2015, “Make a passing reference to the ‘David Foster Wallace fanboy’ and you can assume the reader knows whom you’re talking about; he’s the type who’s pestered at least one woman to the point that she quit reading Infinite Jest in public.” It was a winking reference to an audience that’s already on-board and it felt as natural as product placement.
That is, again, a minor quibble. There are some much bigger issues I had with the movie. When Cassie met her love interest, the handsome, affable and non-threatening Bo Burnham, a classmate from med school who became a pediatrician, my girlfriend and I predicted his character arc with 100% accuracy within the first minutes he’s on screen.
Almost every scene is set up to be one where Cassie gets revenge on people who deserve it. And each time, my reaction was “Oh hell yeah!” It felt triumphant and cathartic, but as the movie moved forward, it felt like each scene was set up with the idea of resolving itself with Cassie finding some catharsis. There were no characters, including Cassie, that felt fully fleshed out, like they’re pieces meant to propel the plot forward. I started to resent the movie because it set itself up to be one where if you don’t like it, it says more about you than the film. Moreover, I don’t think the Cassie character is ever really allowed to be fully human.
Promising Young Woman felt less thought-provoking (despite it being marketed as such) and more like giving its audience what it already knows it wants. That’s totally fine! I thought the movie had a lot of brilliant parts and it was effective at channeling the righteous fury of its main character. I wish Emerald Fennell would’ve either committed to making this a genre/exploitation film with good politics, or elevated the Cassie character. Instead, I watched a good movie that wants you to think it’s a masterpiece.
When I started writing this review, I was surprised to see how polarizing this movie is (I thought my misgivings were unrepresentative until I saw the New York Times derisively said it “turns sociopathy into a style and trauma into a joke”), including in feminist media, though the 91% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes proves others loved it. I just thought there’s a better movie to be made with the sum of its parts, but this one isn’t bad.
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Promising Young Woman is available for rental through all of the major VOD platforms.