To watch a character spiral into this state of being is harrowing and anxiety-inducing – Requiem for a Dream, anyone? – and viewers are positioned to hope the character finally seeks help to address their illness, rather than continuing on the path to self-destruction.īut Cassie doesn't want help she wants Nina's absence to reverberate for everyone who's implicated in her assault and the aftermath, just as it does for her. This pattern, the director told IndieWire, typically goes " in one direction." Addiction narratives, by their nature, are the opposite of catharsis. Fennell has described Promising Young Woman using the terminology of addiction, in that targeting guys in bars is a high for Cassie from which she must inevitably be plunged back down into despair, every time. In one scene, even Nina's own mother urges Cassie to move on and stop living with regret and bitterness for what happened to her daughter. Her parents take notice of her lack of friends, as well as her complete disinterest in pursuing any kind of career. Cassie has spent years clinging to her trauma, having dropped out of med school in the wake of Nina's death and, metaphorically speaking, life itself. "That was sweet."īut in taking a step back and realizing that this is how she's coped – assuming the role of a sort of "Scared Straight" vigilante whose mission it is to teach dudes the laws of consent – night after night and week after week, it doesn't feel like a tension release it just feels sad. It's hard not to take some pleasure in watching Cassie dress down one of those random, self-described "nice guys," Neil (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse with just the right amount of creepy, entitled energy): "You woke me up before putting your fingers inside me," she snarks. Each time one of them inevitably brings her back to his place, she waits to see just how far he'll go to hook up with a barely responsive human, before revealing she's in fact completely sober, thrusting them into a jarring moment of self-reflection.įrom a purely creative standpoint, the conceit is clever. When we're introduced to Cassie, it's been several years since Nina's death, and she's developed an odd habit: going out to bars alone and pretending to be near-blackout drunk to lure the men who would take advantage of such women. In certain ways, Promising Young Woman is a tease, walking its audience up to the edge of conventional elements of the revenge genre only to undercut and upend them. But what do these characters really have left once they've enacted their revenge? And what does it mean for us, the viewers, to root for such vindictive outcomes? (See: The quite good but also very violent John Wick films, which kick off because of a murdered dog.) They also tend to flatten characters into avatars and little else this is especially potent when applied to wronged-woman protagonists, where the vengeance is not just personal, it's (ostensibly) a middle finger to the patriarchy, as with films like The Nightingale and The Perfection.Īs pure entertainment, are they satisfying? Maybe in the moment. Even among the best examples, there's often an overreliance on the idea that retribution in the form of physical pain and/or death equals a form of justice. Promising Young Woman has been described as a revenge thriller, and the "thrill" of such movies is supposed to be in watching the comeuppance for the perpetrator(s). It's an incredibly bleak and unsatisfying fate. In a final kiss-off, Cassie sends a pre-scheduled text to her ex Ryan (who, it turns out, was present during the rape) just as Al is arrested in the middle of his own wedding for her murder. Well, that's partly how it ends to be more accurate, it concludes with Cassie (Carrie Mulligan) dead at the hands of Al, the man who raped her friend, but getting the final word by having left behind clues as to her whereabouts in the event of her disappearance. This is how Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell's cheeky, tart and provocative tale of a woman reeling from the trauma of her best friend's sexual assault and subsequent suicide years earlier, ends. How do you like your revenge served on screen – via torture? In flames? A massive bloodbath? This essay contains major spoilers for Promising Young Woman and other works including the film Hard Candy and the series I May Destroy You, as well as discussion of sexual assault. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie in Emerald Fennell's subversive revenge thriller Promising Young Woman.
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