Promising Young Woman is the feature film debut of actor-turned-director Emerald Fennell. The young Londoner has appeared in a handful of movies and TV shows, from The Danish Girl to The Crown, and produced and written a notable number of episodes of the Phoebe Waller-Bridge-created Killing Eve. That last credit is probably the best touchstone for Promising Young Woman, a whip-smart, wickedly funny, often terrifying tale of femme fatale revenge that inverts and subverts the nearly ubiquitous cinematic male gaze.
Disclaimer: this movie is great, even if you resemble some of the men in this biting social critique (as I do). They range from kinda okay to not-so-great to horrible human beings. Getting angry about this one film’s point of view only proves its point about you. Growing can be uncomfortable, and this movie definitely aims to discomfort.
Carey Mulligan, in a career-defining performance, is Cassandra, a dry, prickly med-school drop-out working at a coffee shop who spends her nights pretending to be overly inebriated at the club, waiting for some nice young man to try to take advantage of her. When said man finally takes things too far, she lifts the veil and . . . well, watch to find out. After each night, Cassandra makes another mark in her notebook denoting how many men she’s coaxed to be hoisted by their own petards.
This high concept hook is what grabs you, but Fennell isn’t content with just genre exploitation (not that there’s anything wrong with it). Her script, her sharp and colorful direction, and Mulligan’s performance bring Cassandra’s un-caped crusader to life. Her strange nocturnal hobby is the act of a broken and desperate person, a person traumatized not by her own experience (not that she lacks any), but by something that happened to her best friend. She’s 30-something, lives with her parents who just miss who she used to be, and has no romantic life to speak of (her nightly missions most certainly do not count).
So when an old classmate shows up at her coffee shop and starts flirting with her, it takes Cassandra considerable time and effort to warm up. Ryan (Bo Burnham) and Cassie’s budding relationship takes the film into unexpected rom-com territory in the purest sense of the genre. They are both realistically romantic and very funny together. The balancing act Fennell pulls off, between thriller, drama, comedy, romance and social commentary is truly a great feat, all anchored by its strong central performance, and buoyed too by excellent supporting roles across the board by too many to name—Laverne Cox, Alison Brie, Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, Alfred Molina, Clancy Brown . . . I could go on.
The climax in the final act is a helluva gut punch in a film that pulls few punches. It would be excusable and even common for a film with such a strong premise to fizzle towards the end. And though the satisfying, and mercifully tension-relieving, denouement raises a few logistical questions, it’s the fearless filmmaking of Fennell, and the uncompromising portrayal from Mulligan, that make Promising Young Woman a truly modern classic.
