Promising Young Woman
Carey
Mulligan’s enigmatic agenda pays dividends in the year’s most
troubling, original, entertaining, ironic and accomplished genre-bender.
Promises, promises: Carey Mulligan off her face?
Make no
mistake, this film is confronting. From the pre-credit sequence of Cassie
(Carey Mulligan) lolling drunkenly in a nightclub alone; being ushered back to
smooth operator Jerry’s (Adam Brody’s) NY apartment for a nightcap; then
snapping back to sobriety to challenge his sexual presumption, Promising Young Woman takes no
prisoners. It’s a #MeToo date rape movie that goes beyond mere revenge. Via
Cassie’s covert mission, driven by an alluded to life-shattering experience
that derailed her all-but-guaranteed future success, we see how non-consensual
sex plays out IRL. Here’s the vile reality of how women are so easily abused
for the crime of being drunk in a club.
Cassie not
only coolly remonstrates her male attackers once her drunken deception has been
revealed: complicit women are similarly challenged. There’s payback for Dean
Walker’s (Connie Britton’s) pitiful bystander actions in service to sinister
college policy on date rape complaints, which encapsulate the disgraceful
reputation-saving responses that we’ve seen on numerous real-life campuses.
Cassie similarly targets Alison Brie’s excruciatingly judgemental middle-class
Madison, who represents the women implicated in decrying rape claims and the
structural sexism that produces them.
Promising Young Woman is not subtle, but
frankly why should it be when nuanced onscreen representations of rape still
get missed by both critics and audiences alike (with the former arguably more
to blame in our mediatory role)? 2014’s It
Follows and its rape-by-deception was the subject of peer-reviewed analysis
that found fewer than 7% of critics perceived the film as depicting rape.
Perhaps no surprise then that writer, producer and director Emerald Fennell,
with head writer credits for Killing Eve,
uses her edgy female-storytelling credentials to ensure no viewer is in any
doubt as to this film’s political message. And like Killing Eve, it does so with momentum and dynamism that ensures
there is dark comedy amidst the misogynistic bleakness. Mulligan once again
shines portraying Cassie’s quiet determination and tragically tortured soul.
You’re passionately rooting for her tentative relationship with former
med-school classmate Ryan, played to perfection by Bo Burnham, to move her on
from her well-intentioned but dangerous project.
Recent
ill-judged debate about Mulligan not being ‘hot’ enough to pull off this role
is further evidence that a bold film on a subject historically represented by
increasingly questionable cinematic tropes is seemingly still over the heads of
some viewers. Cassie is no femme fatale – she is surely the exact opposite. Her
actions epitomise how a woman in her least appealing state, is more likely to
have a predatory man take her home and force himself on her – precisely because
he knows she’s in no fit state to say no. That’s rape, and this film powerfully
considers what these women, whose stories continue to be passed over more often
than not, suffer and lose at the hands of these predators. It provides a window
into how society enables these same abusers to spin a convenient reality that
keeps their ‘promising young’ lives on track – no matter how heinous the crime –
whilst the impact on their victims is so easily dismissed. This is a brilliant
piece of 21st century socio-political cinema that does what it clearly set out
to do. Whilst some critics seem currently unhelpfully intent on pondering what
it doesn’t do, such is the apparent need for novel female storylines to be
reviewed from a place of lack, I’m confident Promising Young Woman will be increasingly venerated over the
years. Bring it on.
WENDY LLOYD
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham,
Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Chris Lowell, Molly
Shannon, Connie Britton, Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, Christopher Mintz-Plasse,
Sam Richardson, Steve Monroe, Raymond Nicholson, Gabriel Oliva, Alfred Molina,
Emerald Fennell (fellatio expert).
Dir Emerald Fennell, Pro Margot Robbie, Josey McNamara, Tom
Ackerley, Ben Browning, Ashley Fox and Emerald Fennell, Ex Pro Carey Mulligan and Alison Cohen, Screenplay
Emerald Fennell, Ph Benjamin Kracun, Pro Des Michael Perry, Ed Frédéric Thoraval, Music Anthony Willis, Costumes Nancy Steiner, Dialect coach Tim Monich.
FilmNation Entertainment/LuckyChap Entertainment-Universal Pictures.
113 mins. UK/USA. 2020. Rel: 16 April 2021. Cert. 15.