PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
Carey Mulligan goes on a rampage of revenge.
“Every week I go to a club I act like I’m too drunk to stand And every week a nice guy comes over to see if I’m OK…”
Written and directed by Killing Eve S2’s Emerald Fennell and starring an electrifying Carey Mulligan, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN is an early contender for most provocative film of the year. Total Film meets the team behind the talking-point movie that’s part candy-coloured romcom, part hot-button thriller.
Once in a blue moon a film comes along with a premise so exquisite and simple that it’s surprising no one’s ever thought about it before – but one that’s also so morally complex that audiences will already be arguing about it even while the final credits are rolling. Directed by 34-year-old Brit Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman is a dark superhero movie where the hero has no superpowers but the ability to shame. At the same time, it’s a clever, funny and engaging film that takes familiar movie tropes and turns them so far inside out that by the end you won’t know if you’ve just seen a truly scary romcom or a very funny horror.
Key to its charm is Carey Mulligan, who plays Cassandra “Cassie” Thomas. Cassie still lives with her parents at home in the suburbs of LA and works day shifts at a laid-back coffee shop.
She’s a mousey, underachieving woman who dropped out of college and never thought to drop back in, but by night she has an alter ego. Wearing a variety of disguises – office girl, club girl, hipster – she trawls the city’s bars posing as a flat-out drunk. And every night she gets a bite, giving would-be date rapists the fright of their lives when she suddenly snaps into focus.
This isn’t simply a lurid vigilante story, however. When Cassie meets offbeat paediatrician Ryan (Bo Burnham), things taken an unexpected turn: is Ryan the proof that Cassie needs that not all men are monsters? And will she finally move on from the traumatic past of her best friend Nina, the motivating factor behind Cassie’s ever more ingenious rampage of revenge?
For a first-time writer-director, it’s an incredibly assured debut that juggles some very serious topics – for one, the issue of consent, for another, the privilege of young, rich white men – while delivering lots of laughs and some very big surprises. But then, having sharpened her instincts writing season two of Killing Eve, that’s to be expected from Fennell. The impetus, she says, came from looking at the world around her. “I like looking at things that we all take as kind of part of our culture – things that are ingrained in our culture – but we don’t think about very much,” Fennell tells TF. “And the thing I started thinking about a lot was this idea that there’s apparently nothing wrong with taking someone home who’s completely inebriated. There were lots of stories in the news, and what was very interesting was it seemed that nobody was arguing that the thing itself hadn’t happened – the men weren’t saying, ‘I didn’t do that. It never happened.’ They said, ‘Yeah, it did happen, but it was fine.’ And that, to me, just seemed so extraordinary.”
This paradox swirled around in Fennell’s head until finally she found a way to express it visually: the chilling scenes in which Cassie opens her sleepy eyes wide and confronts the men who are trying to take advantage of her. “And if somebody is incredibly freaked out by that, surely that means that they do, implicitly, understand it’s wrong,” continues Fennell. “It’s just such a kind of clear and lovely example of something that is so difficult to put your finger on until you demonstrate it.”
Not surprisingly, while Fennell was pitching the movie, not everybody got it. “So many times, the people I was pitching to – both men and women – would say, ‘Oh my God, so she’s a fucking psycho?’ And my response to that was always, ‘OK, that’s interesting. Why do you say that? Because, surely, it should be good that she’s not completely inebriated. What’s happened that makes her frightening?’”
Carey Movie
Frightening isn’t a word that’s often used to describe Carey Mulligan, but Promising Young Woman reveals a previously untapped seam of steel. It also showcases Mulligan’s ability to spin on a dime, playing all the contradictions in a highly volatile and yet still totally relatable character.
“Part of the appeal of making this film, to me, was to make it feel like a world people would want to spend time in,” says Fennell. “I didn’t want it to be didactic. I didn’t want it to have any
answers. I wanted it to just examine a subject I find very interesting in a way that was filmic. There were two routes I was keen not to go down. One thing I didn’t want to do was make something very serious, very dark, very bleak, with somebody who was incredibly intense. But I equally didn’t want it to be about somebody who was – in inverted commas – ‘whip-smart’ or ‘kick-ass’ – all of those words we get now for female characters. What I wanted was an actress who knew that this was a real person and could ground quite a complicated, strange journey, but without making it easy.”
On a hunch, Fennell – herself an actress, recently seen as Camilla Shand in The Crown – sent it to Mulligan’s agent around Christmas 2018. Mulligan read it, they had a meeting, and within a few months they were shooting.
“When I was reading it for the first time,” Mulligan admits, “I did think, ‘How are we going to pull this off?’ In a good way. I mean, it made me nervous, but it was the good kind of nervous: it made me think there were some things to navigate. They had to be done in the right way, and whoever was running the show had to know exactly what they wanted. And with Emerald, from the moment I met her, she was crystal clear about what kind of film she wanted to make.”
The thing that clinched it was Fennell’s take on it: why Cassie does the things she does. “At the heart of it, it’s about love,” says Mulligan. “It’s about two best friends who practically used to be sisters. And Emerald said, when I met her, ‘We’ve seen so many female-revenge movies where chicks get dressed up in tight leather belts and go around wreaking havoc with machetes. But, actually, what would you really do? What would be within your power and what would you actually do if you felt that there was an injustice that needed to be corrected on behalf of your best friend?’ That’s what she was interested in exploring.”
Fennell is flattered by suggestions that Mulligan isn’t an obvious choice. “Well, that’s precisely why I thought she’d be perfect,” she beams. “I mean, for me, everyone in the film is, I guess, not an obvious choice. And Carey’s just so good. She’s so clever, and she’s so funny – we’ve only seen, like, 10 per cent of what she can do. And, I have to say, she’s also the nicest person I’ve ever worked with. But because she’s so good, she also puts the frighteners on lots of actors, because working with her is intimidating. And so what was so amazing was putting her with all of these unbelievably talented actors and comedians, and they just played off each other so well because they all had very different talents coming from different places. I really couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.”
Indeed, the cast also features turns from the eclectic likes of Laverne Cox, Alison Brie, Molly Shannon, Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown. If Cassie didn’t spend her evenings playing cat and mouse, Promising Young Woman could easily be a sweet, lo-fi slacker movie about a dreamer who won’t leave the nest. “In my limited understanding of it,” says Mulligan, “I think it’s easy to regress when you’ve been through trauma, and it’s easy to almost stay the same age that you were then. That can be a response to any really traumatic event. So Emerald and I sort of imagined that staying at home and refusing to grow up was a part of Cassie not being able to move on from what had happened to Nina. That’s reflected in her room – it still feels like a teenager’s bedroom – because I don’t think she wants to be out in the real world. She could definitely have her
‘What’s happened that makes her frightening?’
Emerald Fennell
own place, but being in the comfort of her parents’ home, all of that is a sort of safety net for her. It allows her to do what she does in the nighttime.”
The nighttime, of course, is where Cassie comes alive. “We had a lot of fun figuring out how she would disguise herself every night,” recalls Mulligan, “because the most important thing is that no one recognises her. And the further along it goes, the more she tries to mask herself as much as possible, with lots and lots of make-up and different hair, because her existence in the nighttime should never cross over into her daytime life. There’s no crossover at all.”
To further complicate the situation, there was the matter of playing drunk – and not only playing drunk but playing a sober person playing drunk. “The good thing about this was that it didn’t matter if it looked like bad drunk acting,” she laughs, “because she is acting. So I didn’t worry about it too much because I thought, ‘Well, if people think I’m faking it, I actually am faking it, so it’s cool. This doesn’t have to be the best acting you’ve ever seen. So I let myself off the hook a bit.”
Conversation piece
When it comes to letting the audience off the hook, however, Promising Young Woman is a different matter entirely. As it weaves its web, Fennell’s film invites us to reflect on how sexual assault is normalised within our lives and culture.
“What I think Emerald’s done so brilliantly,” says Mulligan, “is make a film about something that we do need to have an ongoing conversation about. It’s not just about bad guys, it’s about subtle stuff that we think of as being totally normal and acceptable. Em talked about this quite a lot. In fact, she went to great pains to make sure that there’s nothing in this film that you haven’t seen in a kind of bro comedy in the last 15 years. It might seem shocking from this perspective, but we’ve seen a guy taking advantage of a really drunk girl lots. We’ve just always seen it as comedy. We haven’t seen it from this angle.”
Fennell confirms this.
“Don’t forget,” she says,
“even 10 years ago in romantic comedies, hugely successful studio comedies, we had scenes where men took girls home who were really, really drunk, or burned through a ton of faceless, topless women just to kind of get over girlfriends or heartbreaks, whatever. There are movies that I love – genuinely love – that do not allow for those characters’ humanity. They don’t think about them. It’s not malevolent, it’s not malicious, it’s just not considered. So it was important to examine that.”
For all its playfulness, however, the film takes an astonishingly audacious turn in its final act that
few will see coming and many will quite possibly hate. “The only way I could make this film was if I was honest about it,” teases Fennell of the divisive finale. “If you’re going to make a revenge movie that has any kind of violence in it, then you have to be very honest. I couldn’t bear the idea of people leaving the theatre feeling that things had been tied up.”
That’s not to say it doesn’t end this rollercoaster with a bang. Says Fennell, “If you’re going to make a film that’s about something as serious as this, then you want it to be as accessible, as gripping, as thrillerish, and as funny, as beguiling as possible so that the first thing it is is a good film, and underneath that is something that makes you think.
“I’ve been talking about horror a lot recently,” she continues, “but when you look at the most effective, enduring horrors, they’re all coming from a sort of fear that we feel in our gut that we haven’t maybe examined yet. You go back to Dracula and the fear of sex, or Frankenstein and the fear of science. You look at Parasite and what it says about capitalism, or Get Out, and what it says about a very specific, very finely drawn type of racism… These movies are, at the forefront, just brilliant works of art. But they come from some kind of deep gut feeling, and I really hope we managed to get somewhere towards that sort of feeling with this film. It’s its own thing, and it’s an accessible – in sort of a sick way – fun ride, but it’s something that people might have to argue about a little bit after they leave, or at least talk about it and talk about what they felt.”
Mulligan agrees. “You can’t make the same impact with something that’s didactic and dull,” she says, “or incredibly depressing. You’ve got to find a way to continue the conversation in a way that’s engaging and kind of fun, and I think that’s what Emerald has done. You’ve got to feel a certain amount of escapism in every film you watch. There’s got to be some source of release or enjoyment in it, and I think there’s heaps of that in Emerald’s film. But, yeah, it makes me feel really good about sisterhood too.”
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN OPENS ON 17 APRIL.
‘It’s not just about bad guys, it’s about subtle stuff’ Carey Mulligan