Haunted by her friend's assault and the authorities' unwillingness to punish the culprit, Cassie (Carey Mulligan) spends her nights in bars and clubs, pretending to be drunk. When men take advantage of her, she drops the act.
By day she is a hollow shell, solely focused on her nightly vigil. When an old friend re-enters her life, her static existence shifts toward a final reckoning with the people who betrayed her friend...
I was not sure I would review this movie. The primary reason being I was not sure I would have an interesting take on it. The secondary reason is I read too many interesting takes by other people that I read myself out of wanting to see it.
Thankfully, the decade known as 2020 has done wonders for my short-term memory, and a friend asked me if I wanted to go.
Promising Young Woman feels like the meeting of two legacies, one cinematic and the other real world.
It is clearly meant to be a contemporary version of the ‘rape-revenge’ films of the late seventies and early eighties. I am not that familiar with the genre. I came across it when I read about the horror and action genres, but I have no history with that genre. The closest thing in my viewing was The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
The film grapples with rape culture - from the perpetrators to the bystanders and the authorities who ignore it. I think this movie deals with it with a refreshing bluntness but I think the film does not know how to resolve itself dramatically while honoring that honesty.
Part of that honesty is the portrayal of the rapists. None of the figures in the film are presented as overtly threatening. You could call them goofy. You could call them ‘nice guys’. But being nice is easy. It is superficial. It is not the same as doing a good act. Over the last couple of years, I have been fascinated by how much being nice is held up as a virtue - the way certain figures are criticised or upheld for their tone, rather than what they do.
Promising Young Woman takes this theme to its extreme, by opening the movie with Adam Brody as Cassie’s first would-be attacker.
This The casting of familiar comedians and actors with ‘nice guy’ personas as Cassie’s would-be rapists is great transtextual shorthand. This aspect of the movie got under my skin and lingered. I am not sure the rest of the movie will.
Part of it is the script which feels a tad predictable in the way certain relationships develop.
I could also not square the film’s portrayal of assault with the ending. On one hand, the finale features a final comeuppance for the villains, but I could not shake an overriding lack of resolution.
The resolution is a neat idea, but the film preceding it carried such a level of hopelessness that I could not buy into the way it ended. It is good to see bad men taken down, but the film is built on such big foundational problems (patriarchy, misogyny) that the ending felt too clean.
Some of the stylistic choices also felt unnecessary, and I started to question the intentions of the film. The production desire veers between minimalist and incredibly garish - there is faux superficial quality to parts of the diegesis, but then there are other sequences felt stark and more lived-in.
The constant soundtrack of pop song covers felt like it was meant for a different movie, one that is more overtly parodic - I got distracted trying to pick up what song was playing, and the choices felt really on-the-nose. Some of the choices work, but most of them are distracting.
The one element that the movie inarguably got right for me was Carey Mulligan. This is a good film, and it is a good film boosted by a great central performance.
Mulligan was a weight and stillness which is absolutely terrifying. Cassie has been hollowed by guilt, her life reduced to a single purpose, a quest for justice in a world without it. Her performance is so good and so quietly painful, that some of the film’s more outre touches felt extraneous. All the film’s rage, irony and humanity is contained in Mulligan’s face and voice.
Her performance makes me want to watch Promising Young Woman again.
On its collective merits, Promising Young Woman is flawed but effective. It just feels like the issues it is tackling are so much bigger than the scope of its story.
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