Directed by:
Emerald FennellScreenplay:
Emerald FennellCinematography:
Benjamin KracunComposer:
Anthony B. WillisCast:
Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Laverne Cox, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Molly Shannon, Angela Zhou, Sam Richardson, Steve Monroe (more)VOD (4)
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From visionary director Emerald Fennell comes a delicious new take on revenge. Everyone said Cassie (Carey Mulligan) was a promising young woman...until a mysterious event abruptly derailed her future. But nothing in Cassie’s life is what it appears to be: she’s wickedly smart, tantalizingly cunning, and she’s living a secret double life by night. Now, an unexpected encounter is about to give Cassie a chance to right the wrongs of the past in this thrilling and wildly entertaining story. (Universal Pictures UK)
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Reviews (11)
I watched Promising Young Woman without watching the trailer or doing any further research about the film, and I was definitely surprised by the final product. The plot, involving a a crime for which the statute of limitations has expired, is nothing we haven't seen elsewhere before, and you figure out pretty soon what actually happened back then. But the film's engaging element is the ambiguous character of Cassie and her (slightly) sociopathic cat-and-mouse game, which has a justifiable reason. While there is a perceptible wink to the #metoo campaign, I found it non-violent and unobtrusive in its execution. So for just under two hours, to the soundtrack of (at times playfully adapted) familiar hits, I was swept along on a journey of revenge, the conclusion of which annoyed me to some extent but ultimately satisfied me. P.S. In the end I was reminded of The Life of David Gale.
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A rough patch on a rough bag. If it weren't for the (complete) ending, I would probably be a little happier, but even so, Promising Young Woman surprised me a lot with how thoughtfully, stylishly and often mischievously amusingly Emerald Fennell managed to grasp a topic with which she could just as well have had struggles. Carey Mulligan is perfect (one wouldn't even know she's the same actress as in The Dig) and I was pleased with Alison Brie in her small role.
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One of the few #metoo films with a heroine who’s an interesting and complex character, whose actions can be viewed quite critically, but are still somehow understandable. Add to that Carey Mulligan’s impressive performance and you get something really fun to watch, even if some situations stink of screenwriting meddling. Another thing worth mentioning is the soundtrack and one of the most satisfactory endings in a long time.
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Razor-sharp one moment, borderline cringe the next, yet sufficiently provocative and compelling at the same time. The story is obviously mining the current social discourse, but I don't necessarily consider that anything bad. The reason is that it's terribly important whether the filmmakers are capable of working with the story in such a way as to make a good film. In this case, fortunately, they were. It is, of course, feminist all the way, and intellectually bare macho individuals will be disgusted by the overly one-sided female perspective that doesn't differentiate men into good and bad and only classifies their level of character reprehensibility. The personal scorecard in the form of an old-school written diary is one of the biggest cringe moments; on the other hand, it perfectly illustrates the stubbornness and the main character's own hangups. I'm far from suggesting that the cynical recording of all the results could have the slightest cathartic effect on the central character's psyche, yet I can't identify her motivation here in any greater detail. And I actually enjoy thinking about it that way, because Cassie is certainly not portrayed as a black and white character here. Thus, Promising Young Woman definitely has something to offer in the end, as she manages to use all the craziness surrounding the #metoo movement to build seemingly absurd yet compelling themes. [75%]
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If you've known the term "rape culture" for more than a year, you're not looking at the film through the spectacles of this fundamental issue, and thus you can see in all its nakedness how horribly written and filmed the whole thing is. Nowhere in the world do people talk to each other like this, the dialogue sounds like internet discussions read out loud or situations condensed from different articles. It's filmed like a sitcom, it's static (and often with insignificant poser symbolism), and in the faster sequences it's so badly edited that you can't tell exactly what happened. The film even has a reasonable musical structure, yet has no tempo, which I never would even have thought was technically achievable. And I've only seen a romance handled this poorly maybe in the film Obvious Child. Unfortunately, Promising Young Woman is exactly that case where a theme pushed from below gets into the hands of the middle class. It becomes a dull and silly hurrah farce that enjoys its untouchability and success under the wing of its subject. The whole issue of rape culture is thus relegated to a dumbed-down platitude, the trademark strong woman, and by continuing to be represented by similarly bad and calculated films it will retrospectively do a disservice to the whole fight against patriarchal society. Hashtag cinema at its worst.
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