PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN Review
The beauty of art, in this case film, is that the artist can create new and wondrous worlds from scratch. On the flip side of that, artists are also free to explore this strange and sometimes vicious reality of our own, warts and all; and if director/writer Emerald Fennell has any say with her glossy and fiery PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, there are some damn big warts to address.
With such visible targets — namely, the perpetual tyranny of unchecked and privileged men — Ms. Fennell could possibly take her film in a variety of directions: to a ferocious horror revenge flick, a satiric observance of a masculine favoring world, a throbbing depiction of survivor’s guilt, or even a schmaltzy romantic comedy. Instead, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN decides to say “Screw it,” and just go down every possible avenue it can as it details the daily ins and outs of a young woman who happens to be promising, Cassandra (Carey Mulligan). Fittingly, the first image we see of Cassandra is her appearing plastered at a local drinking hole while two dudes played by Adam Brody and Sam Richardson scope her out like scavengers, betting on whether they can successfully take her back to one of their places. From the get-go, the world of PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN is filled with a world of horny, advantageous men (sans Cassandra’s gentle dad played by Clancy Brown) looking to get their rocks off with any woman, no matter her state of consciousness.
However, when Mr. Brody “wins” out and takes the slurring and staggering Cassandra back to his place for some non-consensual acts, Cassandra and the film literally snap into it’s true intentions: a stylistically diverse screed against sexual assault and all who allow it to prosper. Based off its exploitative leaning posters and an equally slick trailer that utilized a symphonic version of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” (which is later used to entertaining effect in the film), a viewer could go in expecting another tasteless “revenge” film where Mulligan dispatches rapey dude-bros with an axe or something else sharp. The opposite of this occurs however, and to her credit, the filmmaker takes the arguably toxic whiff of a “rape and revenge” story — which on a side note, always happens to involve a woman being raped — and filters it through a more realistic take of one woman doling out justice more through words and shaming than with explicit gore. In fact, while very much dealing with the act of sexual assault, Fennell never actually shows it, instead opting to let its impact and threat hang over the film, holding the same terror that any fictional masked murderer would elicit. While PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN at points seems to take as much glee in Cassandra’s revenge tour as its “inspirations” do, the film elevates beyond those trashy works by uncovering the deep sadness of such a mission: while Cassandra may get her revenge at one point or another on some poor sap at a bar, her life has forever been derailed by a single, heinous act at a single moment in the past. For Fennell, revenge is a dish best served cold but she also argues that it sucks just as much to be the server.
Incredibly however, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, like its titular character, is a being of many shapes and disguises and visually speaking, Fennell, along with her production team and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, create a bubbly, colorful world that looks like a studio romantic comedy in all the best ways, allowing the underlying darkness of the material to hit with exacting brute force as it penetrates past the bright blues and gum pinks of the film’s color palette. Unsurprisingly, Fennell’s film dabbles in all sorts of genres and tones and while she never loses track of her end goal, her work can at times struggle to pace itself among the shifting genres, moving with a gleeful rush one moment and stopping dead in its tracks to contemplate said rushes. Even so, the film has a reliable presence in Ms. Mulligan, a consummate professional in the art of acting who knows how to read her character better than the character itself.
With a never-ending supply of witty remarks and barbed observations, Mulligan embarks on a tightrope performance that elicits laughs, sympathy and at times, even disgust. In this movie alone, Ms. Mulligan shows her potential talents in the comedy, action, and horror spheres if she chooses to one day to take on more singular minded films. Around her, Fennell enlists a pretty stacked supporting group of performers that primarily act as archetypes of a world inhabited by sexual deviants, their victims, and the enablers that allow said deviants to run amok. None of them match the depth of Mulligan’s Cassandra but each character gets the “right” performance out of each actor such as Max Greenfield’s enjoyably detestable role as a douchey bro or Alison Brie’s portrayal of a privileged woman aware but uncaring of the plight that some women like Cassandra face. As stated, most of these characters don’t really necessitate too much depth as they more or less are simply there to prove Cassandra’s tainted worldview; however, in Bo Burnham’s role as the do-good, possible love interest to, the actor brings an interesting wrench of sorts into Cassandra’s revenge plot but even then Fennell is more concerned with what he is to the story’s eventual climax, rather than who his character actually is outside of acting as another symbolic figure of a toxic world.
In that way, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN is entrancing in its ever shifting appearance. For better or worse, it’s hard to get a handle on where the film is going or what its message means outside of its observation that wild, male toxicity is bad for everyone, especially women. From the moment the film opens, I was on my toes, tragically thinking (in some ways like the overconfident men found in this film) that I knew where the story would go, filmmaker be damned, but Fennell is crafty and is more than willing to switch onto a different track to take her film into some provocative places. While she doesn’t quite stick the ending, opting for a conclusion that tries a bit to dull its tragic tone, Emerald Fennell has made something here that for lack of a better term, is unforgettable. This is a work that will create conversation, positive or negative, but conversation nonetheless; and with the topic of sexual assault still sadly prevalent in our civilized society, a film like PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN needs to exist, if only to put a brazen voice to an innumerable group of people who don’t benefit from a fictional world where the literal bad guys get their deserved consequences.
4/5
