It’s every man’s worst nightmare, getting accused of something like that.
Can you guess what every woman’s worst nightmare is?
With Promising Young Woman, actress/writer Emerald Fennell makes her debut as a feature director and let me tell you, she delivers a kick-ass movie, a tale very much of the moment told in the spirit of the moment. It’s the story of a young woman who finds her entire life derailed during med school because of a tragic event that then leads to another tragic event. It’s not to exactly spoil anything to say that this is a movie about sexual predation and one traumatized woman’s efforts to flip the script on the kind of nasty men who take advantage of women at every turn. It’s a movie that has a lot of rage, but also a lot of sorrow and I think both of those things are encapsulated by the main character Cassie; for her, the rage all flows out of the sorrow, I think. There’s a scene where she’s let her guard down for a brief moment only to be disappointed again when a man, once again, fails to live up to her standards and when she kicks a trash-can as she stalks away, we see the hurt behind the anger.
A lot of this is down to Carey Mulligan who gives a truly brilliant performance. I’ve always found Mulligan a very charismatic and natural performer, but these last few years she’s really kicked it. I think I still might rate her turn in Wildlife as a tick better than this one, but with Promising Young Woman she’s definitely given us a new number two performance on my list. It’s a fearless, raw performance and neither Mulligan or Fennell are interested in turning Cassie into exactly a fist-pumping heroine; she’s a traumatized, damaged person and she’s playing a profoundly risky game when the movie starts. She’s deeply wounded, but she’s also dangerous; she has the best of motives, but she also has the worst of motives. And Mulligan embraces that ambiguity as Fennell gives us, not the straight-up revenge thriller I think a lot of people were expecting, but something less tidy, less empowering and more conflicted.
The supporting cast is excellent as well. Bo Burnham is really great as a kind of stereotypical “nice guy” that seems like the character who would lead Cassie out of her darkness and redeem her if this was a romantic comedy; do I need to remind you that this isn’t a romantic comedy? Alison Brie is also absolutely perfect in her small role. She only has a couple of scenes, but Brie, another performer who always brought energy and charisma, has matured into an extremely precise performer and she is perfect down to the detail. In her first scene with Mulligan, there’s a moment when she drops a particularly angring line and her hair falls over her face and I remember just thinking, “She did that on purpose.” It’s a detailed, really wonderful performance. The rest of the supporting cast make strong impressions even with very small parts, sometimes parts that show up in only one scene: Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Max Greenfield, Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (giving his funniest performance in . . . a decade?), Connie Britton and Alfred Molina all deserve a mention.
But it’s a great movie, tonally all over the place, but never in a way that feels forced or schizophrenic. The movie certainly has a lot of great humor, some of it dark, some of it surprisingly light. But then it has a really deep, dark psychology to plumb with Cassie and it does it without flinching. There’s a profoundly upsetting scene near the end where Fennell has said she researched how long such an event would actually take and then let the scene in the movie play out at exactly that length and its excruciating to watch. It’s a movie that I like more and more the farther I get from it. I walked out feeling it was very strong certainly, but I had some hang-ups on a couple of things; but this movie is on the ball and a couple of the problems I had with the movie turned into epiphanies later, kind of Fridge Brilliance, as I think TV Tropes calls it, when I realized that the movie was actually thinking deeper than I was, was smarter than I was. That’s pretty rare, honestly, not that I’m a genius or anything. I mean, look, end of the day what I’m saying is this is a heck of a movie and for a debut feature, it’s amazingly assured with its own very specific voice. It would be cute to say, as I’m sure a lot of reviewers have, that this movie proves Fennell is exactly what the title says. But that’s not really correct. Fennell isn’t just promising; she’s already delivering. 4 stars.
tl;dr – idiosyncratic, striking movie has the courage of its convictions and is a gripping, compelling story of trauma and revenge; an excellent cast is lead by a magnificent Carey Mulligan. 4 stars.