Advance: PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN — Fruitcake Enterprises

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Promising Young Woman isn’t quite the feminist revenge fantasy you think it is, but it’s close. One could argue it’s something better.

It’s certainly a fantastic showcase for Carey Mulligan, as Cassandra, the “young woman” of the title who is hell bent on avenging the death of her best friend, Nina. We never see or meet Nina in any way, as this is a story about Cassandra, and her obsession with what happened. Nina was also a classmate of Cassandra’s in college, when a man, with several witnesses, had sex with her while she was blackout drunk at a party. So now, Cassandra spends her weekends terrorizing random men as she pretends to be wasted at clubs until a man inevitably approaches her, then takes her home in the guise of helping her, and then attempts to take advantage of her. She then drops the drunken act at the last second, scaring the shit out of these men.

It’s easy not to feel bad for any of these men, of course. In the opening sequence, three men in a group are noticing Cassandra, hunched over over on a bench, making observations about her in generally douchey ways. Honestly, writer-director Emerald Fennell has them dial up that douchiness to 11, and more than once in Promising Young Woman it’s a little over the top. On the other hand, maybe it only comes across that way to me because I am a man who has never experienced a man’s world from a woman’s perspective. It’s easy to imagine women taking in this film in a very different way from many women, and that might just be subtly part of Fennell’s point.

Still, at times Fennell’s direction is less assured than it could be, though much of that can be forgiven in light of this being her directorial feature debut. (Fun fact: looking up Emerald Fennell, I was slightly thrown for a loop to discover she is the actor most recently seen as Camilla Parker Bowles in season four of The Crown.) Promising Young Woman starts off with its editing and many of its performances on slightly shaking ground, feeling a little off. It does not feel like something crafted with an expert hand—although very much to Carey Mulligan’s credit, the performances alone make this worth watching from the start.

Also, Promising Young Woman eventually finds its footing, in somewhat surprising ways. And its casting choices are fantastic, particularly with Bo Burnham as Ryan, her pediatrician love interest who serves as a charming distraction in the middle section of the story. Burnham is truly perfect as a guy who stands in as an exception to all the creeps. Or is he? The entire arc of the plot is elevated, in the end, by the surprising revelations about him and his place in the story, which make such questions less simple than they sound.

I was somewhat skeptical of the writing, for much longer than it took for the performances to win me over—a good portion of this movie plays like a surprisingly unique romantic comedy, complete with some great humor—until the final scenes, which tied the story together in ways that were impossible to see coming. And that’s even accounting for a genuinely shocking twist in the fate of Cassandra herself.

Promising Young Woman manages to seem at first unable to live up to its promise, before actually exceeding its potential in the end. It’s not quite finely tuned, but it certainly sticks the landing. Honestly the less known about what happens in this movie, the better. It’s a fascinating exploration of defiance in the face of toxic masculinity, especially given that no character actually utters the words “sexual assault” or “rape,” even though these are clearly the things Cassandra is avenging—on men in general, not just the one who assaulted Nina.

I kept thinking about how vulnerable Cassandra was in these situations she puts herself in, sober or not: any average man could easily overpower her, and she always ends these nights alone with them. It’s the shock of her manipulation that gives her power over them, though I’m not sure that realistically this practice could go on without violent incident for as long as her journal of dozens upon dozens of hash marks would suggest. She never physically harms any of these men herself, either; it’s all just an exercise in emotional terror. Until, of course, it isn’t.

What this all means is that Promising Young Woman surprises in all the right ways, at nearly every turn. And the parade of men Cassandra comes across are played by actors perfect for the parts: Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Adam Brody, New Girl’s Max Greenfield, GLOW’s Chris Lowell, Veep’s Sam Richardson (his being a Black man playing one of the creeps being . . . tricky), and more. These are on top of more prominent supporting parts played by the likes of Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge (practically unrecognizable in brown hair) as Cassandra’s parents; Laverne Cox as her boss at the coffee shop where she works; Connie Britton as the Dean of her medical school (a great scene); and Alfred Molina as the lawyer who once defended rapists and is now racked with guilt. The casting choices are nearly perfect fits across the board.

None of them shines brighter than Carey Mulligan, however, as she truly grounds what might otherwise have been a shaky narrative with her performance. Promising Young Woman works as straight up entertainment, and could easily have been trite. But it has nuances not easily seen at first glance, many of them thanks to Mulligan’s confident portrayal of a woman who is, ultimately, mentally unstable. But she is also clever, as is Emerald Fennell, bringing it home in a way that offers real satisfaction.

Overall: B+