Promising Young Woman

“Depending on your point of view, Promising Young Woman could be considered sexist.”

Title: Promising Young Woman (2020)
Director: Emerald Fennell 👩🏼🇬🇧
Writer: Emerald Fennell 👩🏼🇬🇧

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 4.75/5

Among the earnest and lo-fi indie films I’d been watching at Sundance Film Festival, Promising Young Woman burst through the noise like an exploded piñata. Emerald Fennell, a showrunner of BBC America’s thriller Killing Eve, shares her swaggering directorial debut in a film that covers similar content of campy revenge at the hands of impeccably-dressed heroines. Here, Carey Mulligan takes on the mantle and succumbs entirely to the role of Cassandra Thomas, a medical school dropout who bears heavy grief over the rape and suicide of her best friend, Nina.

Killing Eve and Promising Young Woman do harbor some differences, however. Killing Eve’s assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) never holds back from murdering with creative and sociopathic relish. In contrast, despite Cassie’s nighttime hunts for would-be rapists, she retains a moral code that feels grounded in reality. Oddly, her tender humanity feels outpaced by the marching strut of the film, which swings for extremes at full tilt. Sugary candy color palettes or satirical flipping of tropes, such as opening the film on a slow-motion pan of mens’ bodies gyrating on the dance floor, all contribute to a sense of fantasy. But the motivations and actions of Cassie remain ever tied to earth, to the point where it can feel both like a relief that our lead protagonist abides by a code we hoi polloi can understand, yet simultaneously, a bit anticlimactic.

Overall, Promising Young Woman still works wonderfully. But Fennell could have fully embraced the universe she so competently built and driven her points home with satire.

Gender: 4.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Promising Young Woman clearly centers the experiences of women. The entire plot follows Cassie’s emotional rehabilitation after the traumatic death of her best friend, and it feels invigorating to—for once—grapple onscreen with the messy aftereffects of trauma, and to sit with all of those who are hurt by rape culture, not just the literal victim. Unlike your traditional rape-revenge film, the story doesn’t end after a rapist is brutally murdered; rather, Promising Young Woman follows the psychological damage that lingers long after. Fennell confidently turns a magnifying glass to the nuances of sexual assault, tallying the numerous ways seemingly “nice guys” and even fellow women all contribute in small ways to horrific results.

However, despite its well-executed interrogation of rape culture, Fennell makes controversial narrative decisions. Leaving the theater, I even heard a woman call Promising Young Woman sexist, likely due to the way these decisions fall straight into longstanding tropes. (If you don’t want to read spoilers for the movie, skip down to the Race section now!)

For starters, the film gathers steam by way of Nina’s rape and death—neither of which are depicted, thankfully. But we never meet the girl, even through flashbacks; rather, she provides a symbol and catalyst for Cassie’s storyline, like so many dead women in TV and film before her. (The difference being that Nina’s death is in service to another woman’s story; yet the fact of a victim’s symbolism, rather than humanization, remains.)

The most surprising decision, however, comes through the shocking murder of Cassie herself. While she does find vengeance post-mortem, due to some clever safety precautions she put in place that ensure Nina’s rapist (and Cassie’s murderer) would be on the hook in precisely such a case, she still winds up another “fridged woman.” For a film that seeks to dismantle sexist tropes, it feels like a weighted decision to still engage with this particular trend.

In Candice Frederick’s stellar piece on the topic of dead women in media, she interviews nonprofit founder Jennifer Hollinshead who says:

It’s normal for people to need something big to shift their core beliefs or behaviors … But to show that it takes someone dying for men and boys to reevaluate themselves is so trivializing.

While I’m not of the mind to tell women filmmakers how to be a “good feminist”, I do wonder if there was some way to provide the same electric plot twist without having to see Cassie’s mangled body in a fire pit. More satisfying, perhaps, would have been an extension of the film itself—of seeing Cassie survive long enough to claw back happiness and peace for herself, day by difficult day. More radical than seeing Nina’s rapist walk off in handcuffs would be to watch a survivor live another day to fight.

Race: 2.25/5

Promising Young Woman follows mostly white characters, save for Cassie’s coworker, Gail (Laverne Cox). Gail plays the classic supportive Black best friend, without much more to say about that.

In addition, one of Cassie’s targets includes Paul (Sam Richardson), a Black clubgoer who gets treated mostly like a buffoon. Like so many of Cassie’s other victims, he thinks with his dick and stumbles squarely into Cassie’s well-laid trap. Paul’s role doesn’t feel racially insensitive, especially since it’s written to be color-blind. His fedora has more to do with his identity than any commentary on Blackness.

On the plus side, I do think it’s important that Fennell focused her critique on white men in positions of power. By making the perpetrators and facilitators of sexual assault highly educated medical school graduates, Promising Young Woman recognizes how economic privilege and race are inextricable from the societal protection of real world rapists like Brock Turner, Brett Kavanaugh, or Donald Trump. To have made any of the villains in this particular story non-white would have diluted the message, and ignored the way Black, Latin, or Asian men have historically been demonized as sexual predators around white women like Nina or Cassie.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.25

Cassie’s coworker Gail is played by trans activist and actor Laverne Cox. Her powerful presence always lights up the screen, but Gail’s role as the supportive friend feels sigh-inducingly familiar to the roles that so many Black women and LGBTQ play in media. The “sassy gay friend” is even an entire fictional caricature in Rebel Wilson’s Isn’t It Romantic (2019), which lampoons rom-com tropes. Thankfully, Cox is never used for laughs and she plays a perfectly standard coffee shop owner. It’s good to see her being cast, even while the one-sided mentorship she provides to Cassie feels fairly stale.

Mediaversity Grade: B 4.00/5

Promising Young Woman might rub some feminists the wrong way, but overall, the first directorial feature by Fennell feels worthy of the exciting trail that Killing Eve has blazed on television. Above all, its glossy finish and pop soundtrack provide a fun hook for deeper material that asks its viewers to see the full implications of how ugly sexual assault is, not only on its victims but to all those affected by it.

Like Promising Young Woman? Try these other feminist thrillers.

Grade: BLiFebruary 17, 2020Female/Nonbinary Creator