Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman. Courtesy of Focus Features.
Promising Young Woman balances its serious subject matter with a darkly comedic tone and satisfyingly entertaining revenge narrative that feels like a centerpiece of the #MeToo era. Add in a career-best performance by Carey Mulligan and you have a unique gem of a film.
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If points were being awarded for level of difficulty, Promising Young Woman would score a ten. The incredible amount of thematic, tonal, and character weight that director and writer Emerald Fennell has to balance in the film—her debut—is admirable. Does it all work? Most of the time. Sometimes it gets away from her, but even when it does it’s hard to look away.
The movie, which makes a play for my heart by instituting Charli XCX’s “Boys” to great effect, opens with Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) doing her best impression of me at a bar pre-pandemic. She’s sh!tfaced, barely able to hold her head up. Watching from afar, of course, are a group of men just off of work on the prowl. Fennell captures the group like predators—which you’ll see why—stalking their prey.
One of them, however, seems like a nice guy. Jerry (Adam Brody) chastises the men for objectifying Cassie before offering to help her get home. And that seems like the plan at first, but while in the car her makes a last minute decision to take her to his apartment. There he begins to try and have sex with her even though she’s passed out. However, he’s horrified to find you that she’s not drunk.
This is what Cassie does over and over every night as a way of scaring men into never preying on women again. We dig into exactly why Cassie is doing this throughout the movie in bits and pieces, but the core is because of an incident in college where her friend Nina was raped and, as the story often terribly goes, wasn’t believed. Though it’s never said, it’s heavily implied that Nina eventually killed herself.
After a swoon-inducing meet cute with Ryan (Bo Burnham), an old classmate, Cassie decides to finally enact revenge on the people that led to Nina’s suicide—a friend that didn’t believe her (Alison Brie), the dean of the school (Connie Britton), the lawyer who bullied her into silence (Alfred Molina), and the man who did it (Chris Lowell).
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This is the point when Promising Young Woman hits its stride with a keen handle on its darkly comedic tone mixed with devilishly fun revenge thrills—the movie is broken into sections as Cassie takes them down one by one. However, what elevates the movie is the sensitive exploration of Cassie’s complex and fractured psyche. We explore her motivations and why she’s chosen the life she’s chosen—with interludes with her parents played by Clancy Brown and the legend Jennifer Coolidge and her boss Gail (Laverne Cox). She was once on track to be a doctor, but this incident threw her life off track like it does many women.
The observations about men, sexism, and the systems in place—both societal and institutional—that allow predators to often get off free are both broad and specific, giving an acute insight into the plights of being a women in a society that doesn’t protect them. And that very ambition is admirable of Fennell.
The film does feel uneven at points. There’s a lot of story and development to get through—and to pack it up in a glossy and entertaining experience makes it even more difficult to pull off. However, Mulligan’s performance, emotional without being overwrought and campy without being over-the top, keeps us grounded in something real. She’s a revelation.
Even with a questionable ending, Promising Young Woman is one of those movies that you’ll find yourself coming back to. Its a heavy subject that it’s trying to cover, but Fennell does it with both reverence and a bit of cheeky fun that only someone who has a deep understanding of its complexities can pull off.
Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.
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