You’ve never seen a girl quite like Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” before. The daring directorial debut of the English actress and writer (showrunner of “Killing Eve” Season 2; Camilla Parker Bowles on “The Crown”) is an unapologetic stiletto straight to the teeth of insidious rape culture, one that will have you cackling, cringing and cackling once again at its pastel-pink nihilism and scathing indictment of “nice guy” misogyny. Ferociously performed by an all-time great Carey Mulligan, “Promising Young Woman” dares to fulfill a very specific kind of rape-revenge fantasy.
Fennell’s ultra-modern fable is wildly unpredictable but all too recognizable. Like her heroine, “Promising Young Woman” is seductive, bruising and utterly intoxicating. The film’s seven-minute prologue, its opening salvo, if you will, is its thesis statement and introduction to its brutal yet mischievous point of view. These few minutes sharply skewer the “asking for it” rhetoric that justifies the kind of sexual abuse perpetuated not by anonymous attackers hiding in bushes, but clean-cut, exceedingly average men at bars and parties who claim to be “nice” while cajoling, manipulating, coercing and worse.
Mulligan is Cassie, a med school dropout turned surly coffee shop clerk who spends her nights trolling bars for men to take her home. In smeared makeup and too-tall heels, with a convincing head loll, she seems drunk and helpless, going along with their coercions before dropping the act and enacting her revenge.
Fennell’s film isn’t all that gory, but it has the attitude and tone of a horror movie, rendered in cupcake colors. Cassie utilizes her ultra-feminine presentation of long blonde locks, florals and garish makeup as armor, a disguise, and as a weapon in her war. It’s a reflection of the film’s internal logic that nothing is what it seems, the script is built on constant reveals that walk the viewer down one path before ripping the rug out. It’s how Cassie structures her “kills” in her obsessive revenge quest, drawing in her victims before wreaking mental havoc upon them.
Every stylistic choice, from the pitch-perfect production design by Michael Perry to the unique compositions of cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, mirror our leading lady and her actions. The soundtrack of pop tunes, both covers and classics, intertwined with a score by Anthony Willis, assist the tonal swings that playfully flirt with irony, horror and seduction, as Cassie does. She code-switches with ease from sarcastic banter with a love interest, an old pal from med school, Ryan (Bo Burnham), to a ditzy coquettishness, to intimidation. Mulligan executes acrobatic shifts of vocal cadence to signify when Cassie herself is performing, in a layered, unpredictable performance.
Cassie becomes a boogeyman, the hot drunk girl that men whisper warnings about to each other. She’s a girly version of Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” a loner and outsider wronged by the world and outraged at the callousness of others. Night after night she creates nightmare scenarios at bars and clubs, then wrests control, in a gesture toward her own desire for empowerment. Like Travis, she’s not OK, and like Travis, a true happy ending would be almost impossible.
What Cassie enacts against those who have wronged her and her loved ones could be seen as an emotional terrorism, but she’s merely pointing out the hypocrisies of rape culture that prioritizes young men’s futures over the lives of young women. What feels so freeing about Fennell’s take on the subject is she lets her heroine be mad about it, and to act on that rage. Fennell not only indulges that rageful impulse, she wraps it impeccably, delivered with a cheeky wink and impossibly cool sense of style. What a gift.
———
‘PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN’
4 stars
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Laverne Cox, Adam Brody, Jennifer Coolidge, Clancy Brown, Max Greenfield, Alison Brie.
Directed by Emerald Fennell.
Running time: 1 hour, 53 minutes.
Rated R for strong violence including sexual assault, language throughout, some sexual material and drug use.
In theaters Friday.
