FILM REVIEW
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
Dir: Emerald Fennell
The rape-revenge movie has a long and inglorious history of adopting a false stance of female empowerment in order to fulfil male fantasies, not just in terms of sexualising the traumatic assault, but in the act of revenge itself. Revenge in these movies is typically enacted on the physical bodies of the perpetrators, a male sense of power twinged with BDSM undertones by having a woman as the heroine. Promising Young Woman's most potent idea is to feminise the concept of revenge: what if the heroine's vengeance was not on the body, but on the soul? What if, for a moment, she could make those who inflicted trauma on others see themselves for who they really are and understand the gravity of what they have done?
Promising Young Woman's writer/director, Emerald Fennell, was also the showrunner on the second season of Killing Eve. Despite the strength of its core ideas, Fennell unfortunately carries over the weaknesses of her tenure on that show to her first full-length feature behind the camera, notably an inability to maintain the razor-edge balance between drama and irony which Phoebe Waller-Bridge made look so effortless. The intensity of feeling behind the material and its central character is never in doubt, though perhaps ironically, Promising Young Woman is too wounded to achieve its full potential.
The movie revolves around Cassie Thomas, whose friend at medical school committed suicide after being raped. Angry at not seeing justice done, Cassie now spends her evening feigning drunkenness at night clubs and bars, luring men into taking her home to take advantage of her, only to confront them before they are able to go through with it. The opening scenes position Cassie as a horror movie monster about to inflict violent retribution, only to skew in the other direction by having her confront her would-be attackers with the flimsiness of their excuses for predatory behaviour and shattering their delusions of being 'nice guys'.
Though the set-up draws much of its power through its heroine eschewing violence - at least until the end, where it feels out of place and contrived rather than the natural endpoint of Cassie's path - it is undermined by how hard it is to believe that she would not have faced violence herself. As she thumbs through the notebook in which she has marked each of her encounters, the idea that none of these men have attacked her for so comprehensively shattering their egos is a difficult one to countenance. The way Cassie utilises her vulnerability as a woman to lure these men into viewing her as easy sexual prey, only to use their defensive self-image as men who would never attack women against them for protection, almost justifies it, though given the sheer number of notches in Cassie's notebook, that she appears to have thus far escaped entirely unharmed - her parents, with whom she lives, seem entirely unaware of her late-night activities - pushes credibility a little too far.
Once acquaintances from Cassie's time at medical school start reappearing, her focus shifts from the perpetrators of sexual violence to those who enabled it to happen to her friend. The transition into murkier moral waters is welcome, though the movie is never as sure-footed as in its early scenes. The scenes between Cassie and her male attackers function as much through the showing as the telling: the moments when Cassie breaks her facade of intoxication and turns the tables, closing down and standing over her attackers as they back away from her and their own guilt, communicates visually and emotionally in a way Cassie's discussions with the enablers of her friend's assault can only do verbally.
These scenes are not helped by the uneven dialogue, which veers between nuanced invocations of how sexual assault stays with a person long after the physical attack has taken place, and ham-fisted bluntness in drawing upon language used to justify inaction in the face of such assaults. An encounter with the lawyer who defended her friend's rapist is the worst example of this, taking the form of an aggressively over-the-top monologue in which he weeps while overcome with guilt at having defended a man he knew had committed a terrible violation. Cassie's methods of making these enablers feel some of the pain they caused similarly lack the punch of her confrontations with her own attackers by being both too obvious and never believable that she would go through with them.
The other side of Cassie's life has her becoming enamoured with another former medical school classmate, Ryan. This is played as an alternative direction for Cassie, one which might allow her to overcome her trauma rather than live in it. These scenes highlight the movie's other tonal difficulty, an inability to decide whether it wants to be a hard-hitting drama or a neon-infused dark comic satire. Once Cassie and Ryan are dancing together in a pharmacy in a cynical spoof of countless rom-com 'falling in love' montages before it, the artifice makes the outcome of their pairing all too obvious, if one weren't already tipped off by foreshadowing in the early stages of the courtship.
The movie's fantastic side on one hand emphasizes how Cassie is trapped in her traumatic adolescence with a cartoonishly bleak understanding of sex and desire inflicted on her by witnessing what happened to her friend. On the other hand, the tonal whiplash between its irony-saturated, bubblegum revenger aesthetics and its hard-hitting dramatic elements are never close to being reconciled. The deployment of a sexy nurse uniform in the closing scenes is a rare example of the two combining to communicate the relationship between Cassie's mission and her friend's fate in a relatively subtle, unspoken manner. Unfortunately, the specifics of Cassie's plan in the confrontation where the uniform is used are fatally underdeveloped and climaxes with the movie ending on a literal wink emoji, an unfortunately far more common example of the movie wildly misjudging its tone.
On the upside, Carey Mulligan is tremendous in the leading role. A minor kerfuffle has played out since the movie's release over the actress accusing a critic of saying she wasn't 'hot enough' for the role. Leaving aside that the critic said no such thing, that Mulligan looks slightly older than one might expect for this kind of role (even a subversion of it) strengthens the sense of the character having inherited a trauma which has stunted her adult life. Looks are an inescapable part of any actor's toolkit and here only enhances the exhausted, directionless fury which Mulligan evokes in both performance and presence. It is a testament to her skill that she finds a coherent character where many of the supporting cast struggle to find an appropriate pitch for the uneven material.
Promising Young Woman deserves admiration for its ideas and passion, though frustrates as readily in its inability to make the most of them or find a consistent tone or structure in which they can flourish. Though one can sympathise that an entirely sombre take on the material would have come across as blunt and lacking self-awareness, the adoption of pastel-coloured hues, emojis and repurposed Britney pop songs feels like a hangover from the genre it is subverting (female 'empowerment' revenge B-movies often drench themselves in pop iconography as a lazy shorthand for rewriting the rules of femininity) and undermines the anger behind the movie's most propulsive, incendiary elements. [ 5 ]
