Promising Young Woman Review (Film, 2020)

content warning: violence against women, sexual violence, alcohol and drug abuse, misogyny

You know you’re in for a different kind of Revenge film from the opening sequence of Promising Young Woman. A bunch of businesspeople are dancing at a bar. The camera lingers on the hips and belts of the men. Their moves become more aggressive, more sexually charged, as the only woman on the floor gets surrounded by the gyrating men. Writer/director Emerald Fennell doesn’t even let a second go by of her feature debut without letting you know there is no room for the exploitative male gaze in this story.

Promising Young Woman is the story of Cassandra. She goes to different bars and clubs each week, seeing if any man will try to take her home. She’s not looking for a date, but revenge. Cassandra gets men to take her to their homes, where she makes sure they can no longer take advantage of any other woman.

Emerald Fennell’s film is brilliant. There is no other adjective to describe it. She is in complete control of every thought, every visual, every beat, every theme. This continues down to the casting, where actors who became famous as teenagers like Adrien Brody and Christopher Mintz-Plasse play two of the nice guys who try to take advantage of Cassandra in her inebriated state.

The cast of the film is filled with great comedic actors. Jennifer Coolidge plays Cassandra’s mom, a woman driven to her limits by her 30-year-old daughter’s lack of progress in life. Bo Burnham plays Ryan, one of Cassandra’s classmates from med school who tries to date her. Laverne Cox plays Gail, the owner of the coffee shop Cassandra started working in after dropping out of med school.

Which brings us to Carey Mulligan in one of the best performances of her career. She has never been afraid of taking risks. Promising Young Woman is a strange film for an actor of her stature to take, but she clearly commits to every aspect of the character. Her Cassandra feels real in every moment and expression. Even knowing the twist of her character within minutes of meeting her, the tricks she pulls with her physicality and speech to get people to feel safe taking advantage of her (for whatever reason) are remarkable.

Promising Young Woman is all about betraying expectations. There are tropes you expect in the Revenge form, tropes that make the form safer, more predictable. They’re incredibly upsetting tropes, filled with violence and disturbing imagery meant to manipulate your emotions for a forced catharsis. Those tropes are rooted in exploitation films—the cautionary films of the Hayes Code about the dangers of drinking or sex or violence—and fueled by a desire to get away with showing sexual content onscreen without it being mistaken for pornography. It’s a genre driven by misogyny that is slowly being dismantled by new generations of female horror filmmakers.

I’ve studied the Revenge film for years for reasons I won’t get into here. It’s fascinating to see how the presentation of this narrative has and has not changed over the years. I will forever celebrate films like Jen and Syvia Soska’s American Mary, Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, and Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale for managing to tell incredibly progressive, feminist stories out of such a potentially harmful form.

Emerald Fennell takes it a step further. Promising Young Woman doesn’t follow those tropes. It’s unmistakably a Revenge film. The secret hidden in the memories of those who lived the moment drives the plot. It defines Cassandra’s character. You just never get to see what happened.

There is no secret as Cassandra does not let anyone forget forever. You don’t get to see it. You have to trust her. The film starts in the second act of the Revenge structure and just stays there, cycling between tension and triumph without the usual cinematic triumph when the abusers get what they deserve.  

The ending of Promising Young Woman is brutal, one final cruel joke in the life of Cassandra. When I say that Fennell has control of every detail in the film, I mean it. No one else could imagine the ending she came up with to this story. I’ve watched this film numerous times now and still cannot believe what she pulled off. This film is a revolutionary piece of cinema that will be remembered as the film that deconstructed almost a century of sexist tropes in American Revenge films to reinvent the genre.

Promising Young Woman is available to rent on all digital platforms.

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