Promising Young Woman Spurns Emerald Fennell’s Promise
Every Friday night, med school dropout Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) gets made up, heads to a club and drinks until her liver hits the picket line. And every Friday night, without fail, a leering chauvinist finds Cassie slumped over a table or crumpled in a booth, and takes her to his apartment, where she springs the trap: She reveals that she’s sober, not blotto, and she’s so righteously offended by the attempted date rape that she jots the man’s name in a book and heads off on her merry way with a self-satisfied smile on her face.
Cue the sound of air let out of a balloon. In Promising Young Woman, the first feature from Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, vengeance is sweet and anodyne: Comeuppance for perverts takes the form of smug rebuke, as if Cassie is disappointed, but not shocked, at their misogyny rather than justifiably and violently provoked by it. Fennell borrows the setup of revenge cinema and for a while maintains the deception: Promising Young Woman opens as Cassie, out on the prowl and drunk as a lord, ends up in a car with nice guy Jerry (Adam Brody, the first cameo of many by young men known for playing Nice Guys), who switches gears on niceness once they’re at his place and slips off her underwear as she protests.
Here, Cassie coolly shifts into reprisal mode and Fennell cuts to her strolling down the street with a canary smile at her lips, hot dog in hand, ketchup staining her arm red with justice. It’s murder! Isn’t it? Cassie isn’t a killer, actually, just bereaved and weighed down by the baggage of her best friend Nina’s suicide: After getting raped by a popular classmate, Nina sank into despondency and eventually took her own life. Years later it isn’t blood Cassie’s after. It’s humiliation, though frankly her plan doesn’t make much sense: Pulling a man’s card when he has drinks in his gut and lines of coke up his nose seems like a dangerous idea despite Cassie’s sobriety. It’s such a bad idea that the film would make more sense if her plan was to massacre the dimwitted creeps she picks up instead of telling them off.
Denying the revenge genre’s most basic expectation reads like subversion—retribution, but make it anticlimactic. Maybe Fennell, who also wrote the screenplay, wants the satisfaction of saying things to society’s Jerrys (that society’s Jerrys aren’t usually told) even more than the satisfaction of butchering them. Promising Young Woman is her apparatus for voicing aloud what culture critics and journalists have put into digital ink, documenting rape culture’s reach for ages, about male entitlement, toxic masculinity, and the social mores that put greater value on a man’s future than a woman’s life. The film savages old defenses used to protect Steubenville rapists, Brock Turner, and Owen Labrie from richly deserved jail time: Pearl-clutching laments over their futures, their reputations, their youth. They’re just kids! Who among us didn’t do sex crimes in our salad days?