Promise me better for Women. Promising Young Woman film review
Time to rant about another film, let’s go.
The only thing “Promising Young Woman” promises is a destructive femme fatale that doesn’t help any women. This film had EVERYTHING going for it: an all-star cast with incredible acting, cinematography, OUTSTANDING soundtrack, and eye-catching powerful metaphoric costuming. So what went wrong?
The film opens up to a pan of crotch shots at, might as well be Howl of the Moon in any city’s financial district, and a remix of Charlie XCX booming in the background. I am hyped. “Femme Noir” is a favorite of mine: badass women in violent natures. I’m ready to see the less fantastical version of Assassination Nation. In the era of #Metoo and #NotAllMen, Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) plays the vigilante we need, but we deserved better. Instead, we get the professional wrist slapper of sexual assault. Cassandra continues to put herself in high-risk situations; pretends to be drunk and goes home with men intent on taking sexual advantage of her. Just as panties slip off, fingers go where they’re unwanted, she “snaps to” and confronts these potential assailants. Does she kill them? Castrate them? Mark them like the carver in Nip Tuck? Nope, they get a strong talking to. Please put Chris Hansen in this movie, more justice would have been done.
The saddest part about all of this, no women step in to help, and that affects our anti-hero.
As we see our vigilante continue to be a purposeful hot mess, we discover she’s a med school dropout with a vendetta on behalf of her friend Nina. We slowly discover Nina was raped by a male classmate with onlookers, causing her to drop out and commit suicide. I did love this slow discovery within each act about what happened to this Nina character. There are no flashbacks, just slow reveals within the dialogue. It allows the viewer to focus on the now and tells the audience that a woman doesn’t need a justification to hate rapists. However, Cassandra’s obsession with her deceased friend makes her legitimately unsound. As Cassandra decides to give up her own goals and mental stability, it takes away from any “good” that she’s doing.
Director and writer Emerald Fennell doesn’t talk down to her audience by including cheap flashbacks. She trusts the narration and allows viewers to insert their own visual details with actions playing out off-camera. Sometimes the implied acts of violence are more impactful than the need to show every gritty detail to disturb movie-goers.
There needs to be a more concise direction for Cassandra’s motivations. Is this a woman who hates all men or is she trying to personally vindicate one specific rape? It’s been 7 years since this incident, but this is her first time seeking vengeance on the specific male who assaulted her friend. She’s out to destroy everyone in her path, including other women. Although I think it’s essential to convey that women need to be better allies to one another, she puts these women, a college peer, and the Dean’s daughter, in physical and psychological harm for her own vendetta and personal amusement. This is when I started to internally scream. Here we have this bright young woman trashing her future for vengeance and isn’t creating a dent to make the world a better place. I get it… she’s a “promising young woman,” wasting her talent. What’s her purpose in this besides being destructive eye candy? I know seeing a woman attend marches and speaking at seminars isn’t as exciting as watching her roofie a female classmate, but I wanted to see a female vigilante, not a bland villain. Women on Bumble have done more justice with swipes than this.
If you haven’t seen Assassination Nation I highly recommend it, in that film, we have a cast of four high school girls banding together to teach a whole sexist community a lesson (with extreme violence, making A Promising Young Woman look PG-13) and they had more self-control, awareness, and a direct cause. In this Cassandra, an adult woman, unravels blindly, and it’s frustrating, because we know she’s smarter than that. As a viewer, I want to cheer her on and watch her destroy the correct people, but the whole time I’m saying to myself, “this bitch is psycho.” Fuck, I just gaslighted the protagonist. Am I even a feminist because I hate what she’s doing? Stop pitching women against one another Hollywood!
This film also allows for no male redemption. As the credits rolled the only message received was all men suck. They suck in college and they suck now. Cool. There was no growth of any male character on this screen, which I don’t find fair, especially when the male supporting character Ryan (my love Bo Burnham) fell into the lazy “evil all along” trope. While retribution is being carried out, we have a short love story of Ryan and Cassandra. Could our protagonist have a normal life? Nope, we find out, through a magically placed 2000’s cellphone, a video of the rape occurred and Ryan was there! Did he take part in the rape? No. Did he know about it? Yes. Was he extremely drunk? Yes. I’m no lawyer, but Cassandra unfairly plays judge, jury, and executioner pretty quickly. Ryan could clearly have a sound defense case in his back pocket. Does this make him a shitty person? Probably, but as a viewer, we don’t get to see a man learn at all? Then it brings up the super gray area: young men can’t use the drunk excuse / foggy memory? Please don’t let me regret saying that out loud.
Cassandra goes on her last “eye for an eye” mission and it becomes her undoing. We finally get the overall message: exist in a man’s world, but don’t let it kill you, so stay quiet and polite. Glad women have absolutely no rewards in this femme fatale flick. What makes matters worse, the film ends with the audience believing the villains will finally “get theirs.” Cassandra has done her final act, but as a female viewer, there’s this sinking feeling this isn’t where it ends for them. With practically no evidence set up by Cassandra, we know these men will hire the best lawyers and build cases of “self-defense” and other legalities to be fine at the end of the day. We know this because we have seen it happen.
Now that I’ve torn our protagonist to shreds, let’s talk about everything else. The costuming and set design stole the show. We have a palette of pinks and blues, symbolizing male vs. female on-screen. Cassandra looks like she just stepped out of the set of Mean Girls on a Wednesday afternoon and it works. She pops on screen in this “man’s world” of blue hues. There’s also an excellent scene of her confronting the problematic female classmate, Alison Brie, in a restaurant with luscious blue velvet chairs, symbolizing this woman is not going to be an ally to the “pink cause.”
The soundtrack has a nice mixture of classical crescendos and modern tunes. The score keeps us on an emotional rollercoaster, always leaving an unsettling feeling. This movie had everything going for it, except the blood and revenge we were promised. So much thought and detail were laid out, and it does not go unnoticed, but the problematic main character unable to actually help herself and other women around her is so upsetting and destructive to any type of “goal” this was trying to have. The whole time I couldn’t tell what this film was, a vigilante femme fatale story or a revenge film because it didn't work as both.
If this film came out before the wave of #MeToo and/or if I was in junior high or high school, I would have LOVED this. It would have become one of my all-time favorites easily. Also, despite the unreliable “evil all along” motif, Bo Burnham just does it for me. Let me just nerd out here, I love that man, and he can do no wrong. Probably a distraction for me while trying to watch and analyze this, but it needed to be said. Chef’s kiss to Burnham and his useless glasses in this.
If you want to see a femme fatale/femme noir film that works, try Teeth and Assassination Nation.
Overall, C+ for me. As a viewer, you could tell there was a lot left on the editing floor that just didn’t make the cut for mass audiences… cough cough Oscar Nominations. Dear Emerald Fennell, please release a 4 hour director’s cut. Please and thank you.
