Review: Promising Young Woman
I’m not very familiar with the revenge/thriller genre, but I’ve seen enough John Wick sequels to know that revenge is often motivated by personal loss and pain. People cope with trauma in all kinds of ways. Sometimes it looks like depression, sometimes it looks like masked rage, and sometimes it looks like unmitigated, violent retribution. The young woman of Promising Young Woman, Cassandra, seems to embody any one of these experiences at different times throughout the film, but she’s so wonderfully complex, (as portrayed by the brilliant Carey Mulligan) she’s able to hold all of these things in tension. First-time feature director, Emerald Fennell, doesn’t make it a tidy genre film either. She makes us work to understand Cassandra and her process of dealing with her best friend’s death in the wake of an unspeakable tragedy.
Cassandra’s personal brand of revenge takes the form of acting black out drunk at nightclubs to entice a “nice guy” to take her home. When he starts to take advantage of her, she snaps out of her drunken stupor to scare him as he tries to make excuses for his behavior. It’s unclear whether her retribution goes much farther than that, but as she goes from one victim to the next, she can’t quite seem to get the sense of justice she’s looking for.
Her well-laid plans are thrown into chaos when Ryan (Bo Burnam) comes on the scene. His charm flies in the face of her tightly held stereotypes and starts to soften her rough edges. We want to root for Ryan, but in a third act twist, (which I won’t spoil here) we’re redirected to the trajectory that would be inevitable until the crime against her friend is reckoned with and the people involved answer for their crimes.
Cassandra’s journey is fraught and while the film’s tone can feel the same at times, I can’t help but feel that was intentional. Fennell wants us to be uncomfortable because as a society we are way too comfortable with the ways women are treated and even talked about and the norms we’ve accepted in the name of the “boys will be boys” narrative. Fennell, in partnership with Mulligan, gives us a fresh take on the revenge genre and while it will make you squirm in your seat at times, it’s an important conversation starter.