Promising Young Woman is a movie I’ve been looking forward to since I first saw the trailer in theaters, a memory which seems like worlds away from where we are now. Starring the always good Carey Mulligan and billed as a black comedy thriller, it’s the kind of movie I would have bought tickets to see opening weekend, and which on a big screen would have delivered a strong enough gut punch that instead of immediately pushing my way out of the chaos of an emptying theater, I’d have actually sat through the credits.
Unfortunately, most of us won’t get to see this film on the screen it deserves. This past weekend, the 2020 film became available to rent on demand, and so I watched it on my living room sofa with my best friend and our cats. Watching Promising Young Woman in the theaters would have accentuated its luscious visuals and punchy soundtrack, but as it turns out, there’s something to be said for watching it in the company of a person you would absolutely commit murder for.
(Spoilers to follow; CW for sexual assault and suicide)
Promising Young Woman is the directorial debut of Emerald Fennell, whose previous credits include her work as showrunner for season 2 of Killing Eve. It’s not surprising that one of the minds behind such an excellent woman-as-complicated-villain show would turn out this film as her first feature. The movie follows Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a med school drop-out seeking revenge for the rape and subsequent death (presumably by suicide) of her classmate and childhood best friend, Nina.
To be clear, Cassie is not a villain, though some of her schemes creep into morally ambiguous territory. Her typical strategy is to get all dolled up, head out to a bar on her own, and pretend that she’s too drunk to see straight. Inevitably, a guy will come along and offer to “help her get home,” which turns into “just one drink” at his place, at which point he takes advantage of her—or tries to. Cue the beat drop, the sudden clarity in Cassie’s eyes and voice as she repeats herself for the umpteenth time: “What are you doing?”
Walking into this film, I thought we’d be watching Cassie murdering men, perhaps violently, but that is not at all the case. I’m not entirely sure if any of the men Cassie targets are actually killed; we see her conversations with several of the men she’s hired as contractors to presumably punish her victims physically, but we don’t ever see what the punishment is. In several cases, the punishment is merely psychological torture for her victims, the idea of what might have happened, what could have happened — especially when it comes to retribution for the women who were complicit in brushing Nina’s assault under the rug.
In the hands of a different director, we might get several graphic and prolonged torture sequences, but instead, we don’t see the violent punishments at all. This is a movie about revenge, but it isn’t revenge porn, because Fennell isn’t concerned with the punishment itself. What she wants us to see is the moment before that: the moment when a person realizes why they are going to be punished, and in some cases, what lengths they’ll go to to convince themselves that they don’t deserve it.
The things this movie declines to show us surprised me, and I have a lot of respect for Fennell’s restraint. The most we get of Nina’s rape is the audio recording of it, and that combined with the look on Mulligan’s face as she watches the video is more than enough to convey its horror. We also don’t linger on Nina’s death as a suicide — in fact, the way she died is never explicitly stated, because again, we don’t need to know the “how” of it. Knowing why is enough.
I would be remiss not to mention the brilliance of Mulligan’s performance as Cassie, which is crucial to this film’s success. Every smile she deploys is a different kind of weapon, and while Mulligan shows us that Cassie can be a fearless, ruthless monster, in her private moments she reveals the depth of her heartbreak: the bone-deep sadness of having lost her best friend, and as a result, herself. When Cassie allows herself a shred of vulnerability and starts to fall in love, Mulligan’s performance takes on an aching sweetness that gives us a glimpse into who Cassie might have been if things had gone differently.
We’ve all fantasized about revenge, often for much less than what was done to Nina. I’ve planned in my mind exactly what I’d say or do if I ran into certain men on the street, how I might eviscerate and shame them for the way they’ve treated my friends, my cousins, my mother. I know more women who have been sexually assaulted than I know women who haven’t, and with every new story I hear, my desire for revenge flares up anew, taking on a hot and familiar certainty that I could be capable of violence. I think about what I’d do to them, if only I could. What I’d do in a world without consequences for my behavior — a world like the one so many men get to live in.
But that’s not where we live, and it’s not where Fennell places her characters, either. This revenge fantasy does come with consequences, and not just for the people who deserve to be punished. The film’s most divisive element is its ending, wherein Cassie finally gets her revenge on Al Monroe, the man who raped Nina. What we expect from movies in this genre is the exciting and fantastical twist, a plan that will leave our hero unscathed and send the bad guy to the hell he deserves. But here’s the thing: men like Al Monroe don’t get punished until someone is dead, and sometimes, like in Nina’s case, not even then. Cassie knows when she shows up at Al’s bachelor party that chances are she won’t make it out alive, and she also knows that exploiting Al’s propensity for violence against women might be the only way to give him the ending she feels he deserves.
Is this ideal? Obviously not. A woman shouldn’t have to sacrifice her life for a man to finally be punished for rape. But women die every day at the hands of men who’ve been predatory monsters all their lives and have gotten away with it because everyone around them was willing to look the other way for far too long.
I don’t think this movie believes that this is a just and happy ending for Cassie, but that it is the logical conclusion for a film that takes place in the same universe as ours, the one in which a girl is raped on camera at a party and then dismissed by almost everyone around her because she was drinking, because she slept around, because “what did she expect to happen?” Rape culture doesn’t allow for victories, not without devastating consequences.
The darkness of the ending might seem at odds with the frothier elements of the film, its lighter beats of comedy and camp. At times, Promising Young Woman feels as bright and sleek as the pop songs on its soundtrack. But I would argue that in watching it, there isn’t a single moment where we aren’t aware of the danger, rage, and sadness lurking just out of view, and that all its feminine frills just serve to underline the dread that leads us to its conclusion.
