I’m doing something a little different with this review. My wife, Rae, felt so strongly about Promising Young Woman when we finished watching it together that she felt compelled to write about it. I thought it would be cool to get a male and female perspective, for this movie especially. Whenever I write about a movie that focuses on a historically oppressed class of people, I try to seek out someone in that particular group to give me feedback before I publish, to make sure my white, straight, cis, male point-of-view isn’t causing me to write insensitive or unintentionally ignorant things. For this review, I’m including the entire perspective in the form of Rae’s review. I hope you enjoy the experiment. Please let us know what you think in the comments section!
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Trigger warning: as you’ll read in Rae’s review, which I posted below my own review, the movie Promising Young Woman doesn’t actually depict a single frame of sexual assault, but the entire movie is centered around that theme. So while the movie probably isn’t triggering in a direct way, both of these reviews discuss rape.
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Promising Young Woman (2020)
dir. Emerald Fennell
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Focus Features
One fleeting moment in Promising Young Woman serves to unlock the ethos of the entire film. The story’s protagonist, Cassie Thomas, has gone to a bar and pretends to be fall-down drunk. She’s waiting for some guy to take her home because he knows it will be easy to rape her. Rape is all it could be, since, if she were truly as drunk as she pretends to be, she would be too inebriated to consent to anything. Cassie has done this dozens of times, in order to teach these men a lesson. Sure enough, a random guy comes along and hustles her into an Uber, offering to ride with her to “make sure she gets home OK.”
Right on cue, the guy goes about convincing Cassie, a woman who he thinks is on the verge of passing out, that they should head to his house instead. It’s much closer, he says, and they can hang out for a bit. He tells the Uber driver, who’s been stealing glances in the rearview mirror, to change his destination. Does the Uber driver protest? Does he tell this predator it might be best if he takes Cassie to her own home? He does not. The driver simply says, “Just put the address in the app.” Promising Young Woman doesn’t let any man off the hook. Even this Uber driver, on screen for all of 30 seconds, is implicated in rape culture when he looks the other way instead of doing the right thing.
Promising Young Woman is the feature directorial debut of multi-hyphenate talent Emerald Fennell. In addition to directing the picture, Fennell – an English actress who served as showrunner on the second season of Killing Eve – also wrote and produced this righteously seething anthem of the post-#metoo movement. Her film is scathing and unapologetic. It also has style to burn and a lead performance from Carey Mulligan that had me cheering Cassie’s mission as I empathized with the deep pain and scarring of the character’s lived experience.
Cassie was once on track to make her dream of becoming a doctor a reality. She was attending med school with her best friend, Nina. One night at a wild party, Nina drank too much and one of her fellow classmates raped her while she was unconscious. Nina went to the authorities, but no one, including the female dean of the college, believed her story. Cassie dropped out of school to help take care of Nina, whose life fell apart due to the trauma of the assault.
When we meet Cassie, she’s checked out of life. Seven years after Nina’s assault, medical school is a distant memory, but Cassie’s anger at what happened to her friend is anything but. She’s working a dead-end job at a coffee shop, and she lives with her parents. Her sole reason for existing is to go out at night and teach would-be rapists a lesson they’ll never forget.
By chance, an old classmate, Ryan, comes into the coffee shop one afternoon. The two don’t exactly hit it off; in one of the most darkly comic meet-cutes imaginable, Cassie gives Ryan a wrong number when he asks if he can call her some time. That’s after she spits in his coffee right in front of him (to be fair, he told her to do so as penance for his awkward attempt at small talk). Ryan is persistent, though, and Cassie, despite her best instincts, starts to warm to him. At the same time, the old names from med school that Ryan mentions spark in Cassie a plan for revenge.
One of the most intriguing things about our hero, or more accurately, anti-hero, is trying to decipher how much of a monster Cassie is willing to become to quench her desire for revenge. The most harrowing moment of contemplating this question comes when she confronts the dean of the medical school. When Cassie presses her, during a ruse meeting about wanting to re-enroll at the university, about why she took no action on Nina’s report of rape, the dean gives the standard blow-off responses.
She couldn’t ruin a young man’s life over an allegation with no evidence; this sort of thing happens all the time; Nina was too drunk to remember anything clearly.
Cassie then tells the dean that she has befriended the dean’s teenage daughter, and that she dropped her off at one of the college dorms with some guys who are stocked with plenty of booze. The terror that the dean experiences as she pleads with Cassie to tell her what dorm her daughter is in makes Cassie’s point for her, but the movie leaves us to wonder for several minutes just how far Cassie has gone.
Fennell’s direction plays into Cassie’s fragile mental state. She frames several compositions with symmetrical precision – one with Cassie’s head meticulously placed in front of art on a wall, another with Cassie seated on the exact center of a couch – as a visual counterpoint to the turmoil roiling just under Cassie’s surface. That second example, on the couch, comes as Cassie is given new evidence of what happened to Nina all those years ago. It both complicates her budding relationship with Ryan – Fennell gleefully indicts all men in her movie, and she isn’t afraid to sacrifice a romance to make her point – and it kicks off Cassie’s final act of revenge.
Carey Mulligan walks the fine line of pitch-black humor and real-world trauma that Promising Young Woman navigates with a striking deftness. She never lets us forget, even for one frame, the hurt and seething rage that men have caused her. Mulligan, who is English, also does one hell of a convincing American accent. Stand-up comedian-turned-actor Bo Burnham is vulnerable as Ryan, and his turn when the character is confronted with his own past is depressingly realistic.
The climax of Promising Young Woman, in which Cassie shows up to the bachelor party of Nina’s attacker and attempts to burn it all down (metaphorically) to get some sort of justice for her friend, is both righteous and bittersweet. Fennell uses her camera in this sequence to produce some striking, unforgettable imagery. Cassie, posing as a stripper, feeds shots of liquor to the party-goers, and Fennell uses extreme close-ups of their lecherous gazes and Cassie’s hyper-sexualized costume to build tension.
The sequence, and the movie, ends in a shocking twist that is sad but also emotionally cathartic and satisfying. The denouement, in which Cassie deploys her perfectly timed machinations for maximum effect, might be a little too perfect if you think too hard about it. Like the movie Se7en, which is criticized because the killer’s plan is so intricate as to be unbelievable that he could pull it off, Promising Young Woman’s final moments are similarly hard to swallow. Just like with Se7en, though, when everything else about the movie is executed as well as it is, who the hell cares? Promising Young Woman is a reckoning with an odious part of our culture. Fennell gives the perpetrators no quarter.
As it should be.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Promising Young Woman is a thrilling experience. It does what art should do: it pushes boundaries, asks important, timely questions, and is impeccably well made.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The opening dance montage of pathetic, drunk dudes on the dance floor of a club is hilarious, and a great way to start the movie.
- I noted that at one point, Cassie’s parents are watching Night of the Hunter. Not really positive what the connection is, but I’m sure there is one.
- Some of the music cues are reminiscent of Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin. Promising Young Woman isn’t really a horror movie, but the soundtrack by Anthony Willis pushes it in that direction in a satisfying way.
- It can’t be coincidence that Cassie is short for Cassandra, the figure in Greek mythology who was cursed to speak true prophecies but never be believed. Cassie is speaking the truth in this movie, and it’s society’s responsibility to believe her.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I saw this via a screener link. As of this writing, it’s only available in theaters. For those of us not willing to venture into a movie theater yet, hopefully it will be available to stream soon. See it as soon as you are able.
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Promising Young Woman Review by Rae
My first thought after watching Promising Young Woman (PYW), Emerald Fennell’s feature-length directorial debut, was “When can I watch that again?” The trailers for the movie were a touch misleading, and I was pleasantly surprised by the reality of the film. My second thought was, “I want to write about that!” I am just baby-stepping into writing again, so I shamelessly asked my husband if I could write something for his website. In my head, I’ve named this “Double Take” and it will be a monthly feature where we both write about the same movie and yes, this is what it’s like to live with me all the time.
The opening scene of PYW is one of the most perfect movie-opening scenes I’ve ever seen. If you’ve never heard of the “male gaze,” go ahead and look it up now, because the camera is male gazing all up in the soft, jiggling bodies of every average Joe in the club. It’s slow-motion delicious. It lingers on their, ahem, curves. It feels them feeling themselves in the best possible way, while letting us see how foolish they are. At the bar, Jerry (Adam Brody, nice guy) and Paul (Sam Richardson, a less nice guy) are talking to Jim (Ray Nicholson, also a less nice guy) about how this woman at their office is upset that they keep taking meetings at the strip club, ugh. The conversation feels a little too on-the-nose, because it is just an actual conversation that business men have about the women they leave out of meetings. I have heard this conversation nearly word-for-word many times myself.
Women are such buzzkills, am I right?
Then our little trio of assholes nice guys see a woman on one of the velvet couches across the room. She’s wearing business clothes, but they’re a bit worse for wear now. She’s in classic “I’m too drunk to keep my legs together” pose (knees together, feet wide apart, every move shows off her panties). They talk about how drunk she is, that she’s basically just asking for trouble being out in public that drunk, and our hero, Jerry, offers to take her home. She can’t find her phone, so he offers to share a ride with her and suddenly, they’re actually at his apartment and would she like to come up for just one drink? She’s been hanging her head out the window like a dog on an adventure or a drunk woman trying not to puke.
He herds her up to his apartment and pours her a tall glass of kumquat liqueur (Ew! Why?) and makes his move. She doesn’t respond to his kissing at all, but allows him to lead her to the bedroom. He jumps on her, literally bouncing on the bed, reassuring her that she’s safe, that he’s a nice guy, that she can trust him, all while kissing her and pulling her panties off.
“Jerry.”
He freezes.
“What are you doing, Jerry?”
She is not drunk.
“Jerry.”
She is not drunk at all and suddenly, Jerry is very aware of how fucked up all this is. Cut to our real hero, Cassie, walking home the next morning in last night’s clothes, with what looks like blood on her legs. The camera pans up and we see blood dripping down her arm.
And then we see she’s eating a hot dog and it’s the ketchup that’s all over her arm and she does not give a fuck.
This opening scene expertly sets the stage for what’s to come.
Cassie’s meet-uncute with former medical school classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham, ultimate nice guy) at the (artsy, neon-laden) coffee shop where she works merges this storyline with Cassie’s past, giving us a glimpse of why she’s preying on sexual-predator nice guys at bars. It also plops an entire rom-com plot right into the middle of what seemed to be just a revenge fantasy.
He asks her out; she turns him down. He says she can spit in his coffee.
She. Spits. In. His. Coffee.
He drinks it anyway (Charming?).
She gives him a fake number (Clearly not charmed!).
In typical rom-com style, that doesn’t deter him, and he comes back to try again. Does it make a crack in her facade? Maybe. Their romance is the central theme of the second act.
The med school connection, though, stirs something up with Cassie. Ryan still sees some of the old gang and Cassie is particularly interested in what Al Monroe is up to. He’s getting married! How nice!
It’s not nice. Al is the reason Cassie left medical school and the wheels start to turn as she plans to teach everyone involved some very hard lessons. A big, pink Roman numeral marks each person’s turn to learn, reminiscent of the hashmarks we’ve seen in Cassie’s fat notebook, where she appears to record all her fake-drunken bar conquests.
(I spent half the movie trying to decipher a meaning in these hashmarks and what happens to the men they represent…to no avail. Do the colors mean anything? Are the red ones dead now? Is every page full of this? HOW MANY MEN HAVE FALLEN FOR THIS? If you have answers, hmu.)
Along the way, we learn that Cassie still lives with her parents and that her boss (Laverne Cox) is her only friend. We learn that everyone is worried about her, because she’s not really participating in the normalcy of adulthood (a common way we dismiss people who care deeply about something rooted within them). There’s a certain innocence to her clothes and hair and even the pastel-hued rainbow nails she rocks through the entire film are reminiscent of younger days. She’s almost a ghost in her own life, largely avoiding any human connection or responsibility.
We also learn that Cassie doesn’t put innocent people in harm’s way. She knows how to forgive; she understands justice. We learn that she is doing this for her best friend, not herself. We learn that she is very smart and very careful and an excellent planner. We can trust her and we can relax because we know that she’s prepared for everything that happens.
A lot of women I know are scared to watch this movie, because the trailers have led them to believe they will have to endure rape trauma over and over. But there is no sexual assault depicted in this film. It is thoughtfully and carefully made to not re-traumatize survivors of sexual assault. It runs like an undercurrent through the entire movie, but we never see it; that feels a lot like life.
One of the best things about this movie is the casting. Every man, save maybe for Alfred Molina, is a likable guy who has generally only had positive roles where he is charming and nice and doesn’t hurt anyone. Adam Brody, Sam Richardson, Bo Burnham, Max Greenfield, and (our Al Monroe) Christopher Lowell. We don’t meet Al until the absolute last minute, because he is not going to take up space in this movie about a woman’s sexual assault. It’s a stroke of genius that we don’t get to know him or have any idea what he looks like until Cassie is ready to show us who he is. And he’s sweet little [SPOILER ALERT:]
You didn’t watch Private Practice? Weird.
[/END SPOILER ALERT]
Allison Brie is the picture of white woman toxicity. She’s a privileged asshole with an Instagram life who needs everyone to worship her. Connie Britton brings some gravity to her role as the dean who gave Al Monroe a pass, and she knows just how to flip the switch when Cassie forces her to consider her complicity in her friend’s sexual assault. Alfred Molina is so convincing as a former defense attorney so full of remorse that he’s had to take a sabbatical. Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown aren’t given much to do, but they do it well anyway. And Laverne Cox is everything, always.
As the movie ended, my mind drifted to Get Out and some of its similarities. Jordan Peele’s incredible film never lets any white people off the hook for their internalized racism, whether they believe they are racist or not. Not to mention its incredible casting (Bradley Whitford was a particular stroke of genius, in my opinion). It lays the power structure bare and reminds us that we are complicit. PYW never gives any of its male characters a break (unless they are truly remorseful), and it doesn’t let women off the hook for their complicity either. Cassie is fundamentally a good person, even though she is absolutely the anti-hero, so we can trust that she is out for justice, rather than just revenge. Unlike Get Out, which gives us a little hope at the end (depending, I guess, on who you are as a person), Promising Young Woman doesn’t let us have even a moment of relief. Justice can only be achieved if women are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.
There is a Variety review of this movie written by a man who doesn’t get it. Any of it. Perhaps at all. He implies heavily that Carey Mulligan isn’t hot enough to play this part and wonders aloud if perhaps Margot Robbie, who is a producer, should have taken the part.
Sir, no.
Carey Mulligan is absolutely brilliant in this role. I love the claim that Mulligan wears her club clothes “like drag,” as if that’s a detraction rather than the entire fucking point. Mulligan’s performance inside her performance is one of the most mesmerizing aspects of this film and the fact that you can’t see that? Well, it might just make you unfit for critiquing art that wasn’t made to coddle the male mind. Her entire persona, the whole damn thing, is discouraging these men from pursuing her. She is slobbery and drunk and incoherent. She only speaks to them if spoken to. She does not encourage them in any way. She does not kiss them back. She does everything but say no, because she knows that they know that what they’re doing is wrong and disgusting and she wants to make sure we see it, too. I have lived 23 years on this earth as an adult woman and I can tell you that she wore those club clothes the exact way she intended to wear them and that every piece of clothing and smudge of lipstick was well crafted by Fennell and Mulligan and it so fundamentally represents my experience as a woman in a club that I am offended that you don’t get it. But I’m also not surprised.
Please, men. Surprise me? Just like…once?
That’s fine. I’ll let you get back to that business meeting at the strip club.