Review of Promising Young Woman
July 10, 2021
Promising Young Woman (2021) Dir. Emerald Fennell
A debut of merit and then some, writer and director Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman is, pardon the cliché, a tour de force of energetic dark comedy and drama. It tackles hugely important issues of female abuse victims but doesn’t scrimp on entertainment, all performed brilliantly by a stellar cast.
The story revolves around 30-year old Cassie Thomas who lives with her parents but enacts revenge on men she meets at bars who take advantage of her inebriated state (which she fakes to lure them in). A too-little-seen-recently Carrie Mulligan (who is the opposite of her prim Englishwoman in this year’s The Dig) entraps men to give them comeuppance whilst also falling for likeable-to-a-point Ryan Cooper (an excellently enigmatic Bo Burnham).
These actions are underpinned by her hunt for those she sees are ultimately responsible for her friend’s suicide after she was raped in her younger years. And frustrations pour out when institutions and previous classmates dismiss this incident with horrid excuses.
The subject matter is not for the feint hearted obviously. Yet the timely issues around consent, revenge and more sit alongside more mundane domestic chats, and even comedic banter, but each narrative beat is carefully and sensitively selected to build upon the last – creating complexity but not confusion.
As her life spirals into chaos, the audience is constantly wrong-footed about attitudes to good intentions, bad acts and everything in the grey-area inbetween.
A finale at a bachelor party is more Suicide Squad than Olivia Wilde’s A Vigilante, but it’s this mix of pop-culture virtue and incredibly morbid and solemn themes that make the film so compelling to watch from the start.
Twists and turns in the third act are a surprising and satisfying delight and support from Alison Brie as an old friend from college and Clancy Brown as her loving but concerned father are great additions to the central characters.
And it’s great to see Mulligan back on screen successfully delivering on her character's damaged personality which shrugs off any predictability in the film. The spectacular (and Oscar-winning) script is appropriately witty when it needs to be, whilst the speeches and monologues are thrillingly intense without being preachy.
A challenging but fulfilling movie, Promising Young Woman ends as a kaleidoscope of weighty themes and energy and blends these aspects in such a great way it results in the most engaging movie of the year so far.
★★★★★
Michael Sales
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