'Promising Young Woman' Is Not Good

Five Oscar nominations for this??

Last week, when the Oscar nominations came out, the Academy celebrated because for the first time two women had been nominated for Best Director. Of course, this landmark is wicked depressing; only five other women have ever been nominated, and only one has won.

But this year they are two. Chloé Zhao wrote and directed Nomadland (six Oscar nominations in total), which I liked, and Emerald Fennell wrote and directed Promising Young Woman (five Oscar nominations in total), which I really, really did not like. I only learned today that Fennell is also an actress, and plays Camilla on The Crown. That’s not relevant, but it’s fun context. Fennell was also the head writer for the second season of Killing Eve.

Promising Young Woman debuted at Sundance in the winter of 2020, pre-lockdown, and had lots of positive buzz for the whole year. The poster was eye-catching. The visuals are stunning and colorful, and the soundtrack is full of 2000s pop jams to lure in depressed millennials. But underneath all the bubblegum, there’s nothing of substance.

This newsletter will have major spoilers, so if that really bothers you, stop reading. Also, this movie is about rape and violence against women.

The film stars Carrie Mulligan as Cassie, who’s hell-bent on getting revenge for her friend Nina’s rape when they were in med school. Cassie dropped out as a result. What happened to Nina is treated like a weird mystery for most of the film, until the audience finally learns she died by suicide. Nina is not in the movie, though her mom, played by Molly Shannon, is the only voice of reason, telling Cassie to cut it the fuck out. There’s something very unsettling about a rape revenge movie where the victim is just gone.

At the beginning of the movie, Cassie is in the habit of pretending to be almost blackout drunk at the club. When a man decides to take her home — often under the “nice guy” guise of helping her out — she keeps her ruse up, all the way until he makes his move and tries to have sex with her. Then she drops the act, horrifying the would-be rapist. There’s a chilling moment where it feels like she might do anything to them.

And then is evaporates, because apparently Cassie’s revenge plan amounts to strongly worded lectures about how sexual assault is wrong. She doesn’t cut them or stab them or even kick them in the balls. It takes the air out of the movie right away.

As the film continues, there’s this strange sense of placeless-ness and timelessness. It’s supposed to take place in some recent moment — maybe 2019? — but the things people say about sexual assault sound very 2013. That might sound nitpicky, but it makes characters — like Cassie’s other friend from college who blamed Nina for being rape and her old med school dean — feel like two-dimensional “bad guys” instead of well-rounded humans. It would be dramatically interesting if one of those characters was like, “I blamed Nina for what happened at the time and now I realize that’s wrong and I have to live with that.” Alas. The movie is supposed to be set in Ohio, but it feels like Fennell barely even googled anything about America. She definitely didn’t Google how med school works here — because of how residency works, most of your med school classmates would be scattered across the country, not all still conveniently living in the same town where you grew up.

Cassie starts dating one of those old med school classmates, Ryan, played by Bo Burnham. Again, he’s supposed to be a “nice guy,” symbolized by his appreciation of Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind.” This is also nonsense, because no straight man remembers that song exists, let alone remembers all the words. I digress. Ryan, we learn, was friends with Nina’s rapist, and is still acquaintances with him. But Cassie doesn’t date him as part of her revenge plan. Why she would want to be with him is never really explained.

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Eventually, Cassie gets her hands on a video of Nina’s assault, and who’s in it? Ryan. This scene was genuinely chilling, but, again, it doesn’t pay off in any way. Cassie and Ryan’s confrontation about it is a letdown, and mostly she uses it to get information about where the rapist’s bachelor party is.

There, disguised as a stripper, she’s finally ready to break out the knives and hurt someone. But she fails, and in a truly horrifying sequence, she’s smothered to death with a pillow. The rapist and his friend bury her body and move on with their lives. Her parents file a missing person’s report, but nothing comes to it.

Until. We find out Cassie has apparently planned for her own death and sent out incriminating evidence. The police arrest the rapist at his own wedding, while Ryan reads scheduled texts from Cassie speaking beyond the grave, complete with a smiling emoticon. This ending, where cops get to be the good guys who bring about justice for these poor, dead women, is particularly fucked. It’s a lazy wrap up of the film, letting cops — who we know do not care about violence against women and too often enact that violence themselves — be the good guys who get the ultimate revenge against the evil rapist.

Emerald Fennell has said in interviews that Cassie’s hesitance to use violence in her revenge quest is part of the point of the film. She’s said things like this over, and over again:

And so, if I wanted to make a revenge thriller that felt like it was from a real woman's perspective who was acting in a way that I thought maybe a real woman might, a big and important part of that was that I don't believe that women resort to violence very often. Statistically, they don't. In my personal experience, they don't. And there's a reason for that. It's partly because maybe we are less violent by nature. I don't know, but that could be it. But also it's because, and that's a big part of this movie, is that when we do, we don't win.

So the plot of the movie comes down to gender essentialist thinking. Fennell doesn’t believe a woman would ever turn to violence.

Fennell seems to think that because men are bigger than women, they’ll always win in altercations. But some women are stronger than men, or bigger than men, and are still physically hurt by them. I imagine that film, where a woman might train her body to be strong and violent, but might ultimately fail, too. It feels more interesting. (Fennell should also remember that men are not immune to sexual violence, including by women who have less physical strength than them.)

If Fennell wanted to make a movie where a woman tries to get revenge for rape in a non-violent way, that’s possible. But it’s not this movie. This movie is a mess that ultimately says nothing relevant. I wonder if Fennell’s movie could have been saved if she’d set it in the British context she’d more familiar with, instead of placing it in this no-man’s-land America, where everything is just a little bit off. The final revenge is had by the American police, who in actuality have a monopoly on violence and rarely hold rapists accountable and proudly count rapists amongst their ranks. Fennell keeps Cassie’s hands clean, but brings in the ultimate mob at the end to dole out phony “justice.” Nina still died — but it doesn’t seem anyone, including Cassie, really cared.