**I originally reviewed Promising Young Woman on my old blog but decided I would dust it off again now that it is fully entrenched in the Oscar race while also going more in depth with the plot this time around as I left the last review spoiler-free. Consider that your warning because I will discuss the film without censorship from here on out.**
With the movie industry getting pummeled thanks to COVID-19, you could argue that one of the biggest success stories to come out of this past year is Promising Young Woman, the writer/directorial film debut for British writer/actress Emerald Fennell. Fennell was not as well known to most audiences outside of the UK but prior to Promising Young Woman, her name was attached to Season 2 of Killing Eve and she most recently played Camilla Parker-Bowles on Season 4 of The Crown.
After having played Sundance in January of 2020, the film was scheduled to have an April 2020 theatrical release which isn't exactly prime season for films that might be vying for Oscar attention. You could argue that in any normal year that a film such as this might've got lost in the shuffle had it opened in April. However, the pandemic pushed the release date back to December and thus the buzz surrounding Carey Mulligan's performance soon translated into...pardon the pun...promising buzz for the film itself.
Many doubted that the film would even go far. I recall some saying Carey Mulligan could slip into the Actress race and that Fennell MIGHT slip into Original Screenplay...and now as of this writing, the film received 5 Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing. While it has the least amount of nominations out of all 8 of the Best Picture nominees (6 of them actually have 6 nominations apiece), it has a very mighty list of 5.
I'll refrain from going into the Oscars themselves because I will probably discuss the film's chances in more detail when I do my final winner predictions in mid-April.
For now, what exactly is Promising Young Woman about?
Cassandra 'Cassie' Thomas (Carey Mulligan) is a 30 year old woman still living at home with her parents and working as a barista. We soon discover that she was previously in medical school and hoped to become a doctor, but as the movie begins, we first see her in a bar and she appears to be wasted out of her mind. A group of manly men see her and one chooses to take her home but then opts to take her to his place instead with the intention of taking advantage of her in her drunken state.
As he lays Cassie onto the bed, her voice slurs as if she is on the verge of blacking out: "What are you doing?" and her "knight" just assures her that she is safe.
Then...
Cassie: (fully) Hey....I said "WHAT. ARE. YOU. DOING?"
What we learn as the film progresses is that Cassie dropped out of medical school when her friend Nina was raped at a party and their school essentially looked the other way as if to say that they couldn't properly condemn the man in question who raped her. While it isn't explicitly stated, it is implied that Nina committed suicide after it seemed that she had no one out there that believed her and the lawyer representing her rapist fought hard to destroy her reputation.
Cassie's response to this is essentially to demean and punish men but what is very clever about the film is that it toys with our expectations as to how she would go about this. Her plan is simple: pretend to be drunk, get taken home by a "nice guy" and then essentially embarrass and verbally abuse him once she lets it be known that she is cold sober.
After the first scene in which we see her respond coherently after she was seemingly wasted, we see her doing the "walk of shame" the following morning with a streak of red running down her leg. We are led to believe she killed the guy only for the camera to pan up and show that the red isn't blood but rather ketchup dripping from her hot dog.
Practically like clockwork, a group of construction workers spot her and begin cat-calling in her direction. Instead of walking away, she just stands there...and watches them as she continues to eat her hot dog. Her stance completely turns off of the guys who give up on trying to "flirt" and they resume working.
In these first couple of scenes, we see a side of Carey Mulligan that we've basically never seen before.
Carey Mulligan as Cassie
When one might think of Carey Mulligan, she is usually one of those actresses who often seems trapped in either period pieces or films in which she plays more conservative or put together women: An Education, Wildlife, Mudbound, and The Great Gatsby all come to mind...and even in darker efforts like Shame or Drive, she comes across as very pristine in some ways.
I feel like we haven't seen Carey Mulligan in such a youthful and modern setting before and frankly, there are times where I honestly feels like she disappears into this role. I normally hate when critics or reporters and whomever say that phrase but there were several moments in the film where how she was made up combined with her impeccable American accent that it truly did not seem like this was the same woman I once got the pleasure of seeing live onstage in David Hare's Skylight.
Mulligan's work isn't exactly big and brash. She doesn't exactly have a lot of scenes where we see her scream and yell but her performance is still quietly volatile. There is almost a bubbling simmering intensity to her and it truly shows that she has range in areas she was never given a chance to portray...which is partly why Emerald Fennell wanted her for the role.
Speaking of Emerald Fennell, I am thrilled that she is getting this kind of attention for her debut. Her wit and intellect are a true delight and I have enjoyed watching any interview I could find with her discussing the film (often done in tandem with Mulligan).
Fennell is telling a story that is just as relevant to the world today as the racial tensions are with films like Judas & The Black Messiah and, to a lesser extent, The Trial of the Chicago 7. This film taps into the #metoo movement and the rape of Nina and the completely scot-free acquittal of her rapist Al is practically reminiscent of the story of Brock Turner with dashes of Brett Kavanaugh.
She also stated in interviews that her intentions with the film weren't to necessarily praise Cassie's tactics. She feels that basically no one in the film comes out of it looking angelic...and in terms of the more pivotal characters to the story, I would say that is an apt statement.
Even the lawyer character Jordan Green, played by Alfred Molina, who had previously worked with Mulligan in the truly charming An Education, represents something of the opposite: a man who did a truly vile thing but now he is trying to make up for it while living in his own regrets for destroying Nina's life during the original accusation.
This sort of 180 in terms of trust and appearances is completely apparent with the character of Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham), a doctor who attended school with Cassie and Nina and who has suddenly reappeared in her life with a genuine interest of dating her.
Mulligan with Bo Burnham
At first, Cassie is sort of cold and doesn't completely trust him whereas Ryan almost feels like a character that may have been dropped in from a Richard Curtis romcom. You sort of long for her to open up and trust him only for us to discover later on that Ryan actually witnessed the rape of Nina and did nothing to stop it...and he also seems to be rather unsympathetic towards Cassie when she confronts him.
When Cassie discovers this fact, she receives a video that was taken of the incident and watches it in tears. In a way, this is one of the finest moments for Mulligan in the film when it comes to acting. After appearing to be strong-willed and snarky and bitter for practically the whole movie, we finally see Cassie break down. In the end, this revenge plot all comes back to her dear friend that she loved. I saw someone post online that they viewed Promising Young Woman as an unexpected portrait of grief. I think that is very true and it is remarkable at the layers you can find in this movie when you go back to look through the story a second time.
The film has managed to create a lot of division in terms of reviews. Some people absolutely loved this movie while others hate it...and that isn't even factoring in the ending.
The final 15-20 minutes of the film are going to divide people and that has to do with both how the film chooses to end and the decision that Fennell made to have Cassie be murdered.
Nina's rapist Al, played by Chris Lowell, is about to get married and Ryan intends on going to the wedding...however Cassie lets him know that she isn't going to let Al get away with it. She arrives at a remote cabin where Al's bachelor party is occurring posing as a stripper named Candy. The look of Mulligan as Candy deserves to become iconic. For reference, here is that image below:
She doesn't plan to murder Al; she just wants to carve Nina's name onto his stomach but this is where the film turns even more bleak. Some people have criticized that Mulligan is not convincing enough to be a femme fatale of the likes of Barbara Stanwyck...and that her eventual demise in this scene with Al breaking from her knots and suffocating her with a pillow is essentially her own damn fault for not being polished enough.
For me personally, I think that is the point of the film and of this character. This idea of Cassie as a party-girl/femme fatale/revenge seeker is NOT who Cassie is so she isn't always going to be perfect at it. She is essentially playing a role within a role.
Once Cassie is dead, Al's friend Jerry (played by Adam Brody in a cameo) finds the two of them in the room and in order to hide the evidence, the burn Cassie's body in the woods while "Something Wonderful" from The King and I plays in the background.
Going into the wedding scene following this, you aren't quite sure what is up but it appears that Cassie had devised a backup plan just in case she wasn't going to get out of it alive.
Here is where I think a lot of people start to differ more drastically on their opinions of the film.
In what seems like a divine intervention (complete with Juice Newton's cover of the song Angel of the Morning), the cops arrive just as Al is about to get married and arrest him for the murder. We see that Cassie utilized the help of Molina's lawyer character Jordan to provide proof and we also see a police dog locate the site in which Cassie's body was burned alive.
To top it all off, texts prepared by Cassie prior to her death are sent to Ryan's phone as this all pans out that gives him just a few spare moments of knowing that everything is ruined before Al does.
You could argue that this ending is a little too "perfect" in the sense that it does seem highly unlikely that everything would be timed out so conveniently to the situation but, for me, the ending works on a strong emotional level.
The other factor to the ending that I've noticed is getting a lot of flack from people is the decision that Fennell made to have Cassie be killed. One reviewer on Letterboxd said she felt that the film took a sexist approach by saying that all of Cassie's actions were basically irrelevant and that it was saying that the idea that a woman has to get murdered for the rapist to even get justice.
I don't deny that validity of this statement but my take is more bleak than that. I feel that Fennell was aiming for that bleak but somehow bittersweet tone because it simply is disgusting that a man can do something like rape a woman and then have his fancy lawyer drive the victim to suicide. To top that all off, it takes another woman involved to get murdered by the same man in order for him to receive justice.
It has been a while since I can think of a movie that made me feel so many different emotions at the end. I was thrilled, I was sad, I was livid, and there was a sense of both vindication and defeat. It just sort of amazes me that Fennell was able to accomplish that with the ending.
So, what did I think of Promising Young Woman?
A very strong and eclectic debut from Emerald Fennell. The film was able to blend so many genres and had such an appealing aesthetic that simply popped. You could almost go as far to say that the film basically looked like a colorful lollipop even when it was at its most bleak. Fennell said she took a lot of inspiration from 90s romcoms like Clueless and cheesy Lifetime TV movies from that era but I also feel like you could even argue there was a dash of John Waters in there too. Not so much from a broad comedy standpoint but mainly due to the contrast of bleak scenarios occurring amongst a bright, colorful atmosphere.
This is a film that is going to trigger people in ways that are certainly understandable, but the main takeaway from this film is that the justice system is fucked up and perhaps we should do better with people who may have difficulty coping with their grief.
RATING: 4.5/5
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