Promising Young Woman (2020)
Emerald Fennell was the director, executive producer, and showrunner for season 2 of the darkly comedic TV show “Killing Eve” and works as an actor, most recently as Camilla Parker Bowles in “The Crown.” Shortly before the #MeToo movement took hold, Fennell had a dream. In the dream, a drunk woman is lying on the bed of a stranger. He tries to take advantage of her. She keeps asking, drunkenly, what he’s doing. Undaunted, he persists. Suddenly, she sits up, completely sober, and asks again, much more sternly. He recoils in defense.
Fennell grew upset thinking about the teen movies watched growing up and observing how easily consent was given away or taken by the male suitors who get them blackout drunk. Getting a woman drunk is all too often portrayed as how young men should seduce women, lowering both their inhibitions and ability to leave a situation. The “Walk of Shame” was played for laughs, the young woman stumbling out into the public, hungover, not knowing what happened to her the night before. This was not only commonplace but largely condoned by society at large. However, Fennell and many women didn’t view these actions as seductive at all – they are predatory.
Fennell actually started working on her screenplay in 2017, slightly before the #MeToo movement – before Harvey Weinstein was exposed and before Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. She channeled that anger into a story about female rage called Promising Young Woman. At its core, it’s a revenge thriller, but unlike others that came before. It doesn’t go for Fatal Attraction–style violence, or sexualized male-gaze teases to titillate audiences. Fennell observed that women very rarely resort to violence when wronged. She limited her characters to how women might act when seeking to give predatory men their comeuppance.
She also wanted it to be revenge done by someone who loved the victim rather than the victim herself because of the protective aspect. Often, the victim is too traumatized to act for fear of more trauma, but those around her who see what she’s going through want to immediately strike back at those who caused it, as well as the system that lets them get away with it. Traditionally, male vengeance involves hunting down the perpetrators and having them regret getting caught shortly before they die. In Fennell’s script, she felt a worse punishment is by exposing the nature of their actions and having them live with it the rest of their lives.
Determining to make the jump to becoming a feature filmmaker with this story, Fennell packaged her story in the context of a thriller to get the message across in a way that would keep audiences engaged and entertained. Instead of dark and brooding, Promising Young Woman is as colorful and light in its look and tempo, with a catchy soundtrack, just like those innocuous comedies she once enjoyed. Like the protagonist, the comic nature lures people in, but once they’re locked in, they’re taken on an unexpected detour.
That protagonist, Cassie Thomas, lives with her parents in Ohio while working in a dead-end job at thirty years old, a barista in a small coffee shop. Her parents have been encouraging her to get on with her life in ways that aren’t even subtle. Their latest birthday gift: a suitcase.
Cassie spends her evenings at the local watering holes to the point where she’s in an obvious stupor. Inevitably, someone will offer to do the right thing and give her a ride home. However, temptation gets the better of them, and they’ll tell the cab driver to take her to their home instead. There, they reveal themselves as not so good, and she’ll reveal herself to be not so drunk, shaming them for essentially trying to rape a woman who is too intoxicated to give consent truly.
At work, Cassie has a run-in with Ryan Cooper, a former colleague from medical school now working as a pediatrician. Here we pick up clues learning about how she was once on a fast-track to becoming a doctor. Still, she dropped out for mysterious reasons involving her best friend Nina Fisher, the victim of a sexual assault that never got justice – until Cassie made it her mission to stop predators in their tracks. Ryan seems different, cracking through Cassie’s tough exterior, offering a bright future. However, when she learns that the person most responsible for Nina’s rape is nearby and about to get married, she has to decide which path she should go down, the path of promise or the path of vengeance on everyone who done them wrong, including the seemingly indifferent school educators and lawyers who downplayed the allegations.
Promising Young Woman explores whether one bad act keeps a person from ever being seen as good. Many guilty parties absolve themselves for being young or drunk. Cassie seeks these people out, years later, to expose that their utter lack of remorse about what they did to ruin the lives of others shows that they really aren’t any better today than they were back then. One character has been racked with guilt. Cassie determines that he’s one of the rare ones who’s learned his lesson. Forgiveness is a theme, but only for those who truly feel ashamed.
Mulligan read the script and eagerly signed on. She saw the subject matter as truthful, more so than controversial. So many other movies trivialize the predatory aspects of college parties and the club scene. Cassie’s colorful appearance masks her darker thoughts. Those inner demons get exorcised by becoming an “avenging angel,” albeit only for a moment, by luring young men and catching them in their predatory acts. Yet, they still return, continuing to mourn the loss of someone who used to be her whole universe. Then she has to do it all over again.
Audiences attuned to thrillers will be ahead of the increasingly implausible and woefully manufactured twists. There are also tonal issues that make Promising Young Woman an uneven experience overall despite some excellent performances and a handful of great moments. Fennell sought Mulligan for the role because it was a kind of movie she hadn’t been in before and because he is soft-spoken and not a big public persona, which makes her still enigmatic to most moviegoers. She was also talented enough to deliver a real performance within the heightened reality of the thriller genre. Mulligan and Fennel are the same age (35) and had had similar starts in the business together as eighteen-year-olds appearing on the same episode of “Trial & Retribution,” though they went their separate ways since then.
The male characters were cast with actors many recognize as “nice guys” – rom-com regulars like Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chris Lowell, and Max Greenfield. Fennell wanted actors we already have good feelings about, and we haven’t seen as lecherous date rapists. Fennell upends the notion of “gentlemen” and reveals that that “nice guys” and “good guys” are not synonymous. Underneath, most men are looking for the same things, but the “nice guys” will often drop that act when they get what they want and can even be complete jerks when it seems like they can’t get it. “Good guys” know it’s wrong to take advantage of a situation and, ironically, aren’t always nice. Many of these guys think they’re good guys because they don’t go around scheming to do bad things unaware, but they aren’t under certain circumstances where they get a bit of power.
If the film works at all, it’s thanks to solid performances, especially by Carey Mulligan. She’s too mature for the role but portrays well someone stagnating through life and stuck in a whirlpool of misery and grief. Bo Burnham is immensely appealing as the only guy who manages to let Cassie’s guard down by showing that he’s not like the others. His charisma proves infectious, especially during a charming impromptu singalong to Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind.”
Questions abound: How can Cassie have done what she has done every week for over a year in the same community? One would think her activities would quickly earn her a reputation among the regulars at local clubs, especially where she will run into the same clientele, so how does this work? How does she know they won’t actually take her home every time? What address does she use, and what would happen if they arrived there?
In one of the most contrived of all developments, a video emerges of the crime, answering one question but leaving many others out. Why would the person who owns such a video keep it for so many years, and even transfer the file from, of course, as soon as it is introduced, we can easily guess it is only because it offers a story reveal that we know if coming as soon as it is introduced. Conversations lack any form of authenticity, letting characters talk on long after conversations would be ended by at least one party to divulge additional plot points. People seem to exist solely to service the story; Alfred Molina is a lawyer who silenced Nina, who seems to have spent years waiting for the moment when the plot would involve him. Connie Britton, the college dean who tried to sweep it all under the rug; in one of the least effective story angles, Cassie has lured the dean’s daughter away under the pretense that she too experience what Nina did. It would seem so horrifying if the film weren’t built on a bed of artifice.
The very end of the film tosses any hold on plausibility, however tenuous, into a freefall to try to tie up every loose end with wish fulfillment. It should be noted that this table-turning ending was not the original one. The one she had in her mind was much more of the violent retribution she had avoided. But Fennell felt that would eventually ring false to the character. Then she decided on the Greek tragedy ending, which is depicted in the film before an extended epilogue continues the revenge tactics. The financiers insisted that it couldn’t end just in tragedy, so Fennell concocted that epilogue to get the film made.
Powerful is the theme of how revenge can sometimes be destructive to the person who seeks it. Like a saying often attributed to Confucius goes, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
Qwipster’s rating: C+
MPAA Rated: R for strong violence including sexual assault, language throughout, some sexual material and drug use
Run time: 113 min.
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Laverne Cox, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Alfred Molina, Chris Lowell, Connie Britton, Steve Monroe, Adam Brody, Sam Richardson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Max Greenfield
Cameo: Emerald Fennell
Director: Emerald Fennell
Screenplay: Emerald Fennell