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Promising Young Woman, writer / director Emerald Fennell’s acidic dark comedy that covers an incendiary rape revenge plot in pastel luster, directs a beguiling, looping trap: Cassie, a singularly obsessed character played with singularly depth. impressive by Carey Mulligan, pretends to be near-drunk in a bar, plays with the predatory machinations of a skeevy man, then flips the switch when he begins sexually assaulting a woman he believes too drunk to notice her or to care. “What are you Make? She asks, suddenly as sober as a stone. The first time Cassie pulls the trap, in the movie’s first sequence, it’s not entirely shocking – if you’ve seen the trailer, you know her plan for revenge – but given that it’s the OC core Adam Brody as an aw-shucks predator, Mulligan’s perfectly calibrated facade drop is a bewitching and bewildering jerk.
I wanted to root for that trap – the movie wants you to clap for that hook – but by the second trick, as Cassie shocks and condemns another shady loser (this time played by Superbad’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the thrill of l exposure decreases. Halfway, when Cassie, on one last revenge for the pain of her invisible best friend (I won’t spoil the very bad thing behind her rage, but it’s not hard to guess from the start of the movie ), targets his past Dean of Medicine (Connie Britton) who turned a blind eye to devastating behavior, I had to hit the pause button. The film was billed as a gripping rework of the tired rape revenge drama, a #MeToo madness that relishes comeuppance for self-righteous villains. But Cassie’s annihilating obsession – reducing her character to the shadow of the worst thing that has ever happened to her – didn’t seem giddy or revealing, but a frustrating ending. The film didn’t feel so edgy or provocative as, in its singular focus on vigilante justice, a very recent relic from the heady early days of public rage #MeToo.
Promising Young Woman, with its tangy bite and somber fatalism, is purposefully ominous, but watching it in late 2020 was unsettling, like a song that’s barely out of tune. Its melted core took me back to the end of 2017, when the early #MeToo movement flooded with white-hot rage – a constellation of private aches suddenly given vague, albeit revealing, form in the public forum. There were many deep-seated hooks on which to hang outrage: the Harvey Weinsteins, which sparked lingering outrage over the Brock Turner case, which itself recalled the 2012 Steubenville High School gang rape recorded on cellphone footage (a crime and trauma similar to the unseen tragedy at the heart of Promising Young Woman), which landed in a much different media landscape, with the Daisy Coleman story, than the one we currently occupy.
But more than three years after the #MeToo movement merged, a decade and more in the flood of internet stories, story after story, of horrific, excused, mundane and infuriating cases of sexual assault and our culture’s unpreparedness to discuss it with any psychological nuance, we know that there are bad men, bad excuses, bad records. To unmask is a limited thrill. Promising Young Woman encapsulates a story of archetypal aggression in its most austere nuances – vigilante and villainous, unaffected, a woman whose trauma encompasses her personality. Where is the insight in this exhibit? What is left when the rage wears off?
Part of the nano-specific anachronism of Promising Young Woman owes to the long film development pipeline still stretched by the pandemic (after a fashionable Sundance debut, Focus Features pushed back its broad April release date to Christmas), and the high speed Internet of the late 2010s in which cultural conversations skyrocket and erupt day and week. The film has its trump cards – Mulligan’s performance, how he harnesses the benefit of the doubt given to Cassie’s blonde and white femininity, with her feathery bangs, rainbow manicure, and bubblegum pink wardrobe. (The fact that the film’s commercial premise – a revenge fantasy in which a woman systematically targets handsome men – largely depends on Cassie’s blonde and white femininity is not mentioned, an undeniable limitation.)
But its issues – putting up easy punches against barely drawn characters who say and do all the wrong things – dazzle in comparison to other contemporary works grappling with the shifting ghouls of trauma, the slippage of the complicity and the insidiousness of prioritizing power over clarity, like HBO’s The Tale, which explores the fracture of time and trauma of personal narratives, and a woman’s ability to change her understanding of what makes her feel arrived. Or the finale of HBO’s I May Destroy You, which uses rape fantasy as a healing mechanism without the trauma becoming obliterating, black matter à la Cassie. Last year, The Assistant avoided focusing on Promising Young Woman’s evil men for a striking (albeit opposite) portrayal of systemic rot and toxic adjacency in a Weinstein-style production company.
In other words, all the pieces that turn the same horror soup into jagged, die-hard edges that burrow rather than the bifurcation of good and bad people. The macabre and confused outcome of the promising young woman is certainly shocking, but at the cost of surprise; there’s little room to run when Cassie and the movie assume everyone’s worst potential. This gloom stems from the early days of #MeToo, when the exposure was a revelation, when recognition of the extent of toxicity was history. I would like to understand the next chapter, believe in healing, change, potential, complication or progress, which could also be the sweetest revenge.
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