Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman was one of the first movies I was looking forward to seeing in 2020. And it was only about a week away from opening when the theatres were forced to shut down. Unlike so many other movies, for months on end there was no new release date announced for it and I assumed it would drop on streaming in a manner similar to Palm Springs. But it retained its exclusive theatrical window, now at the end of December -which is clearly not the time of year it was meant for. I kinda wish it could have struck an on-demand deal though. People in luckier areas may still get to see it, but for the vast majority of its audience, that option is not open to them for safety reasons.
What’s most unfortunate about this is that Promising Young Woman is a movie a lot of people should be seeing, and especially men who are perhaps not so self-aware of their actions and attitudes towards women. It’s a thrilling revenge fantasy yes, about a woman catching sexual predators, but one that is extremely steeped in the miserable reality of widespread sexual assault and pervasive toxic masculinity. It is the revenge thriller for the #MeToo era, but much more genuine than that may sound, unafraid to be brutally honest in its indictments and sharp commentary on a culture of misogyny -in addition to being full of terribly delicious catharsis.
Its’ protagonist Cassie, played by an astute and provocative Carey Mulligan in one of her finest performances in years, is the ideal vessel for such a catharsis: a former nursing student still carrying the trauma of her best friend Nina’s suicide seven years earlier, grappling with it by playing drunk at bars and clubs until guys inevitably take her home, and confronting them viscerally when they try to take advantage of her. Because she doesn’t press charges or do anything more extreme, it seems to be her warped way of teaching them a lesson, exposing their true natures to themselves -after all, each of the incidents we’re shown involve self-proclaimed “nice guys”.
This is a very important point that she doesn’t harm any of these guys, as might be expected or easy. Fennel seems uninterested in turning her protagonist into just another slasher killer for male viewers to otherize as a threat, she wants Cassie to be more nuanced, more empathetic. And she wants the audience fully on her side when she decides to execute an elaborate plan of revenge against the parties responsible for the death of her friend. Even though her methods don’t generally rise above psychological torment, that certainly doesn’t stop the movie from going to some very dark places as it follows her.
Promising Young Woman never actually uses the word “rape”, but it confronts the peripheries of it more directly than about any movie I’ve seen. The most intense sequences are not the bits of Cassie manipulating guys through her drunken shtick, but a series of conversations with people from her and Nina’s past that highlight the ways in which rape culture is allowed to endure: whether it’s an old friend engaging in victim-blaming, or an administrator sweeping it under the rug. That scene in particular is especially harrowing, when Cassie with a polite air and under the auspices of returning to school, listens to her former dean (Connie Britton) dismiss the dangers of drunken college boys, further victim-blame, and insist on the importance of not “ruining a young mans’ future”, before being taken to task in an eminently frightful way. It even manages to give the H.R. scene from The Assistant a run for its money.
Fennel and Mulligan spend much of the film routinely slapping the audience across the face with their theming -it’s not subtle at all, but probably shouldn’t be. And Fennel is a smart director too, building on her intensity and mood, and at times making a grotesque show of the figures she’s condemning. However she’s not quite so apt at managing the alternating tones of the piece. Cassie’s whole vendetta is essentially a double life she leads, and the film spends quite a bit of time in her more conventional routine: her job at a coffee shop, her life at home with her parents, and particularly a burgeoning romance with an old classmate played by Bo Burnham, who’s very good, and whose natural charm, humour, and good-natured attitude proves his casting extremely methodical. And it’s a very different movie, almost a romantic-comedy, a substantial length of time is even dedicated to it when she decides to quit her schemes. Mulligan is a good enough actress to oscillate sufficiently between these two vastly distinct sides of her character, but the tones still don’t link up altogether well, especially whenever it leans notably heavily into either the dark thriller elements or the earnest romantic stuff.
But what’s certain to be the most contentious aspect of this movie is its’ ending, and I’m not even entirely sure where I fall on it. The point that is made is very visceral and potent, the defining moment quite deliberately uncomfortable to watch. There is satisfying catharsis ultimately, Fennel is determined to leave the audience with that -though I do get the sense it’s not unlike the Get Out situation where Jordan Peele substituted a realistically bleak ending for a happier one. There is a point in the last ten minutes where this movie could end that would leave it on a really dark note (no spoilers, but it takes place in a doctors’ office). And a part of me is glad it didn’t, but at the same time the ending chosen seems to want to simultaneously be pessimistic and optimistic -it grapples between brutal realism and wish fulfillment fantasy and you can take either one. But the key choice of the ending regardless sends a disturbing message about the circumstances of accountability that is absolutely not the case.
Still, Promising Young Woman more often than not, sticks the landing where it counts. It’s delivering a message we need to hear (and by “we” I am referring principally to straight men) about sexual assault, sexual trauma, and accountability in a relatively unfiltered and in-tune with the modern dialogue way. It is a necessary film, but it’s also a good one, in spite of its struggles with tone and resolution. It’s ending really should in fact be seen and debated. And at the very least it will have done its job if it provokes at least some of its male viewers to second-guess themselves when deciding to hit on women in bars.
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