Here’s a promise: You won’t forget Carey Mulligan
Every so often, there’s a new movie that really feels new, and not just new, but right. “Promising Young Woman” is one of those movies.
It announces a brilliant new writer-director, so in that way, it’s the product of a single imagination. But, as is often the case with the best movies, it also feels like an emanation of the times, as if the movie were on the tip of everyone’s tongue, but no one could quite see it and no one could quite articulate it, until Emerald Fennell came along and turned it into something amazing
Fennell, best known in the United States for playing Camilla Parker-bowles on the Netflix series “The Crown,” lands “Promising Young Woman” in a specific zone that’s not somewhere between funny, serious and ghastly, but is somehow all those things at once. And she places, at the center of all this, Carey Mulligan, an actress whose comfort in this space is practically unsettling.
We first see her in a nightclub, alone, clearly drunk or drugged almost to the point of unconsciousness. She is spotted by a group of guys, and one of them goes over to her, offering to drive her home. But once he gets her into his car, he drives her back to his place, instead, whereupon she snaps into sobriety, with an alertness that’s frightening.
This is Cassie, and this is her
unusual hobby. She goes out alone and pretends to be in a state of incoherence, and then terrifies the supposed “nice guys” who take her home. To be sure, there is something wrong with these guys, but there’s something a little wrong with Cassie, too. She is replaying a trauma that she cannot get past, one that upended her life when it happened to her closest friend.
From the beginning, Mulligan brings to Cassie a host of attractive and arresting qualities. She has directness and force, and she seems brilliant. She’s witty, but
underlying the humor is rage, and underlying the rage is grief. A former medical student, now working in a coffee shop, she seems to have rejected the world. But it’s not as though she’s frightened of it. It’s more like she’s too smart not to know what the world really is.
What Fennell and Mulligan build in these early scenes is an intense desire, within the audience, for Cassie to be happy. They use this desire well. One morning she gets up and her parents, with whom she lives, wish her a happy birthday. This
comes as news to her. She forgot that she was turning 30. Nobody forgets turning 30. So, obviously, this interesting, worthy person is depressed and distracted, and she deserves better.
Bo Burnham plays Cassie’s former med-school classmate, Ryan, who enters the coffee shop one day. Burnham forms a nice contrast with Mulligan — bumbling and self-deprecating, while she is contained and self-assured. And Ryan is a particularly wellwritten role, full of funny lines, which Burnham delivers with smart timing and a winning modesty.
But Mulligan is the one to watch, the one you can’t stop watching. She’s vulnerable, fierce, brutally honest and just plain fun in this. See her here, and then see her in “Wildlife,” from last year, in another free, inspired, grand-scale performance. Mulligan is doing intuitive, dazzling work that feels almost dangerous — acting without a net.
As for Emerald Fennell, she earns with “Promising Young Woman” the right to expect everyone to want to see her next movie. But apart from the excellence of this film, Fennell may have tapped into something tonally that truly expresses the moment we’re in.
Point being, we’re in a time of horrible ridiculousness and ridiculous horribleness. The revelation of “Promising Young Woman” is that its heightened reality feels more real — closer to actual reality — than comedy or drama.
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