’Promising’ Revenge
In this slashing, blackly comic satire, Carey Mulligan gives male predators a taste of their own toxic medicine
Carey Mulligan gives predators a taste of their own toxic medicine.
In a prickly early scene of Promising Young Woman, a diabolically funny, dead-serious takedown of toxic masculinity, an alleged nice guy tells a trashed young woman he’s brought back to his apartment that they’ve made a real connection. She practically laughs in his face; he’s been too busy trying to get her into bed to learn a thing about her. So let’s fill him, and you, in: She’s Cassandra Thomas, a med-school dropout who’s about to turn 30. Her hobby is going to clubs, pretending to be blackout drunk, and waiting for someone to take her home. That’s when she issues a scary wake-up call no would-be date rapist could possibly forget. If you need a primer on the meaning of consent, Cassie is more than happy to oblige. As played by Carey Mulligan, brilliant in movies from An Education to Wildlife, this avenging angel means business. She is definitely not someone you want to fuck with.
Welcome to one lit-fuse bundle of revenge-movie dynamite, courtesy of its thrillingly talented creator, Emerald Fennell. Remember the name. This
British triple threat is 34, and her résumé includes writing clever YA books ( Monsters, Shiverton Hall), acting (she’s the young Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown), and taking over for Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge as showrunner/head writer on the second season of Killing Eve (which earned her two Emmy nominations). She shook up Sundance in 2018 with Careful How You Go, a wicked short film about vengeful women (WallerBridge played one of them). Not coincidentally, Cassie happens to be reading a book with that very same title — a nice callback that doubles as a warning of things to come.
Astonishingly, Promising Young Woman marks Fennell’s feature debut as a writer and a director. She sets her tantalizing provocation in the here and now of American suburbia and wraps it in a candy-colored package (Benjamin Kračun’s cinematography is pure sugar) that suggests she’ll go easy on us. Don’t be fooled. The result is a bonbon spiked with wit and malice. “Hey, what are you doing?” Cassie snaps when numerous dudes (played by Adam Brody, Chris Lowell, and a priceless Christopher Mintz-Plasse) respectively realize she’s not really out of it when they snake a hand up her skirt or try to take advantage of her “inebriated” state.
What exactly is Cassie doing? There’s no way this review is going to give away Fennell’s endgame, except to say that the driving incident happened to a med-school friend that Cassie treated like a sister. And it’s not just men who feel Cassie’s wrath. There’s Dean Walker (Connie Britton), who caved to the he-said-she-said excuses once upon a time. And there’s Madison (Alison Brie), a fellow college student who stayed mum in the face of irrefutable evidence.
Though Mulligan is Fennell’s perversely comic partner in payback, to which an instrumental of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” adds just the right bottom note, there’s no question that Cassie is flushing her own life down the tubes. She lives with her parents ( Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown) and works at a coffeehouse, run by a simpatico boss (Laverne Cox), so she can cosplay as a damsel in distress — her lipstick-smeared face suggests Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker with a different spin on retaliation.
A bright spot enters Cassie’s life in the person of Ryan (Bo Burnham, killer good), a former classmate who’s now a pediatric surgeon. Their reunion involves her spitting in his coffee, a fab singalong to Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind,” and the fact that his height (about six feet six) will make it look like he’s dating a child. Burnham, famous as a YouTube comic-musician and for his exceptional directing of Eighth Grade, pairs irresistibly with Mulligan.
Is there hope for this couple? Have you met this antiheroine?! As the film moves to a shocking climax, it takes a big swing at the wolves who tread through the #MeToo era in nice-guy sheep’s clothing. But, like Cassie, Fennell hits hardest at the conspiracy of silence around the predators. Fennell wants us to laugh at Promising Young Woman. She also ensures those laughs stick in our throats.