Film review: Promising Young Woman
Director: Emerald Fennell
Writer: Emerald Fennell
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie
In European and especially American cinema, stories of rape and revenge are not new; from court dramas such as The Accused, A Time to Kill, numerous American B-production movies, thriller-mysteries such as Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to recent Oscar titles such as Paul Verhoeven’s Elle or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri by Martin McDonagh, rape-and-revenge is already a separate genre.
But Promising Young Woman, the directorial debut of versatile Emerald Fennell, an actress and screenwriter, is a film that leaves the impression of a cover version of the genre in the most positive sense. The film is a satire, a black humor thriller, whose weakness may be a bit indecisive in that deconstruction of the genre, but the fantastic Carey Mulligan fills those gaps in the script (Fennell won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, while Mulligan was nominated for Best Actress) .
Promising Young Woman focuses on Cassandra "Cassie" Thomas, who still lives with her parents, works in a cafe and spends nights in bars and clubs "hunting" men for sex, pretending to be intoxicated to the point of unconsciousness. Then she writes down each conquest in a small notebook hidden under her childhood bed and the process begins again. Cassie, dressed in pastel colors, floral patterns, braids and ribbons, listens to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, and the room looks like Barbie’s house. The director herself has repeatedly stated that she made the choice of music and the complete look of her protagonist to show that things are not always as they seem - under the gentle exterior hides a woman of anger and rage.
At first, the question remains what happens to the men - does she kill them, hurt them or just leave them? Cassie gets in the way of sexual predators and manages to cause fear in these men. The hunt begins with the trauma caused by the suicide of her best friend Nina who was raped at a party while studying medicine with Cassie at college. After learning that the main culprit had returned from his studies in London and that he was going to get married, Cassie begins her revenge mission. The key to the story in Promising Young Woman is that guilt is not limited to Nina's rapist – it’s ubiquitous, shared by all the male and female characters in the film. Trauma is contagious, violence breeds violence and eventually shoots.
The rape itself is not shown, we only hear it from a cell phone recording; the director consciously avoids explicit depictions of sexual violence, although the genre itself is not particularly subtle and that is where Fennel's subversiveness lies. There is romance, and a parody of American comedies from the 1990s, comic dialogues, but Fennell is not lost in that experiment or relativizes the trauma that Cassie is facing.
For some, the ending may not be cathartic or satisfying enough, but it seems like the only logical ending, reminiscent of the many times instances of violence and misogyny faced by sex workers who end up hurt or dead.
