OnScreen Review: "Promising Young Woman"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
Earlier this month I saw Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a 2020 drama about a teenager who goes with her cousin to New York City to get an abortion. It was an uncomfortable and challenging movie, not just because of the main subject matter and harrowing journey the two characters go on, but because of its added commentary about the world that women have to navigate that is populated by predatory men. Men like bosses who suck on their fingers when they change out their cash registers at the end of their shift. Men who call them a slut when they perform a song at a talent show. Men who masturbate in front of them on the subway because there is no one else around. This was one of the movies that popped back into my mind when I saw Promising Young Woman, a debut feature from writer/director Emerald Fennell.
Carey Mulligan stars in Fennell’s film as Cassie Thomas, the titular promising young woman who works in a coffee shop and lives at home with her parents at the age of 30. She was once a promising young med student who dropped out after a traumatic event. In her spare time, though, Cassie goes out to clubs and pretends to be drunk. Invariably and without fail, some guy comes over to her and tries to take advantage of her, and when she gets back to their place, she soberly “confronts” them about their misdeeds, keeping a tally of her “conquests” in a little book she hides under her bed. A chance encounter with a former classmate and now doctor, Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham), leads to a potential relationship but also the potential to exact some vengeance on certain people in her past.
As someone who is likes his comedy like some people like their coffee, as black as possible, Promising Young Woman is right up my alley. I consider Dr. Strangelove to be one of the funniest things I have ever seen, and it is lampooning nuclear annihilation. This movie had me cackling. Not laughing at the jokes, which I was doing when they were made, but laughing to myself that I was getting to watch something that was this audacious and subversive and twisted. Movies like The Lobster, Parasite, Midsommar, Jojo Rabbit, and even Ready or Not are just a few of the movies in the last few years that have provoked a similar reaction out of me.
Fennell’s an actress who has had a few supporting roles in the last decade on a few films and shows and she has even written a few episodes of television. She is an unknown to me, and it is exciting to see someone announce their arrival with a first film like this. The movie never reveals exactly what Cassie does to her victims, whether it is just scaring the holy hell out of these men or something short of killing them, but I do not think she is a murderer. I love that the film leaves that bit of ambiguity for the audience, the degree of her malice is never fully shaded in for us.
As great as the composition of the story is, Carey Mulligan makes the notes sing with her performance. As Cassie, she is an avenging angel of the #MeToo movement. She has a perfect DGAF attitude and almost zero sympathy for the men who she is confronting, throwing their words and actions back in their face and pleading their innocence when just moments earlier they were ready to take advantage of her in a compromised state. Would-be predators become her prey. Mulligan impressed me so much with her debut lead in An Education and while I am not someone who has seen all her work, I have yet to see a bad performance from her. I also think she is criminally underutilized by studios; not that I need her in a Marvel movie or anything, but I would like to see her in more.
Promising Young Woman could easily have been an exploitation movie, but I’m glad that it doesn’t go completely in that direction. Like the best black comedies, it is intended to provoke and challenge and make people uncomfortable, but not completely turn people off to what it is saying. It is amusing to think of how many movies are made with an eye toward vigilante justice being desirable and applauded; heck, even most superheroes are actually vigilantes. In that case, maybe Cassie is like Batman, the hero we deserve but not the one we need. At the very least, certain types of men should probably be grateful that this is just an audacious movie about a woman exacting a little bit of vigilante justice on men trying to take advantage of her and not something that is really happening in bars and clubs. Probably not, anyway.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5