Promising Young Woman (2020)
“It’s every guy’s worst nightmare, getting accused like that.”
“Can you guess what every woman’s worst nightmare is?”
Quirky, disturbing, occasionally funny and sweet, and ultimately frustrating.
Ever finish a movie and not know how you feel about it? That was Promising Young Woman.
The premise is pretty straightforward. Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) is a late twentyish woman who has experienced some sort of trauma and is coping as most do in that situation: working at a dead-end coffee shop job, living with her parents, and - at night - going to the club, where she pretends to be drunk to lure unsuspecting predators to…some sort of punishment. Just what that means is never entirely clear. In some cases she gives the men who take her home a stern talking to. In others…the lesson may be more painful. But like many things in this movie, we are never entirely sure.
Along the way she meets the man of her dreams, a saccharine sweet Bo Burnham, who serenades her with Paris Hilton songs, and (not getting too Spoilerly) has some sort of connection with the events that sent her into her revengista spiral. The two have great chemistry - and lines - and their developing relationship is one of the sweetest to show up on the silver screen in a long time (until - Spoiler - it isn’t).
Ok, that’s two Spoiler tags in one paragraph: as many as appear in a normal full review, but we’re going to have to pull out a bit more to really talk about this film. Be warned: Spoilers await.
So what’s the deal with this movie?
It has some very good things in it. A lot, actually. Emerald Fennel (who plays a weirdly good Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown) does double duty as writer and director and delivers a sharp script with dialogue that is simultaneously funny, disturbing, and true to life. As a director…wow…it is hard to tell whether she is hopelessly inept…or brilliant.
The story feels massively ambiguous and disjointed. Cassandra looks a whole lot like a serial killer, but it is never quite clear how far she has gone or is willing to go (‘though we get a clue in a great scene with Alfred Molina). The presentation of her relationship with Bo Burnham, while really charming, feels like an entirely different movie. And the end of the film…ok…let’s see how carefully we can walk the Spoiler line here…
The movie’s finale involves Cassandra launching a complicated plan to gain revenge on the guy that upended her life. It unfolds in one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve viewed in awhile, leaving the moviegoer shocked…but a few minutes later, weirdly uplifted as the movie ends with her seemingly triumphant.
Here’s the thing…
Her plan is built around the police arresting Mr. Bad. But the things she does to bring it about - illegally drugging a bunch of people, threatening to carve someone up with a scalpel, and a bunch more, suggest that her revenge will almost certainly be fleeting. It is unimaginable that the bad guy - a seemingly well regarded doctor with a ton of money - would be unable to hire a legal team that gets him off and successfully paints her as a wack job.
This is why the movie left me and my film partner scratching our heads for an hour after the credits.
Promising Young Woman is, at is core, not a comedy or thriller or any of the other marketing tags Hollywood threw on it. It is a film about rape culture. About the normalization of things like date and acquittance rape; blaming victims and excusing predators; and the impossibility of moving on from some trauma. In that light, the ending is wildly off the mark, promising a happy, irrational, and unbelievable wrap up…
…or it is brilliant.
If the ending was planned…a story in which Cassandra, for all her work, is doomed to fail…(which, given the connection of her name to the Greek Cassandra, is not implausible), then wow…well done.
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You can check out Promising Young Woman HERE.
Three Out of Five Coffee Cats.
Dig Promising Young Woman? You might want to sample one of these.
