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)
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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It's a refreshing mix of an unadventurous romantic relationship film and a drama with a social subtext. The film opens up and tackles today's hot topics such as the ills of social networks, sexual violence and, last but not least, the eternal well of ideas in the form of pigeonholing and clientelism. At times it feels a bit like Basic Instinct without the explicit violence, Jerry Goldsmith and the ice pick, but it is endearingly nerdy or, coldly formulaic and sophisticated. Mulligan in her best role in years and thank goodness the ending isn't messed up and needlessly overdone. The only thing that really jumps out at you are the occasional moments where the characters can do 100 different things, but they do the one that fits the story so that the plot can continue.
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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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It would be tempting to say that it's an uncritical critical success primarily because of the subject matter and the gender behind the script and direction, but that would be unfair to the author. The qualities in this case are due to the way the current #MeToo issue is conceived "with balls" and free of obscene declamations. I don't share the objections to the author's black-and-white "men are pigs" vision when it's the women (Madison, the dean, the ambivalent anti-heroine Cassie herself) who contribute to the overall effect/impact of "rape culture" here, after all, that's what the two acts of the revenge plan are all about. What's more, even if it did, it rides such a surgically precise black-humor wave about an achingly serious subject with a clever, deliberately overblown 80s pop neon styling that it's impossible not to fall for. Carey, then, is as engrossing as she is disturbing with her complex "PTSD performance" in the whirlwind of a self-destructive spiral of vendetta, and so perhaps only the line with Ryan grates a little too much, because it's too obvious from the start why she's there and where she's going with it. The weakest link is of course the hotly debated ending. Not the ending itself – that one is perfect –, but rather the epilogue. On the face of it, it's delivered in a way that brings satisfaction, but the further away from the screening, the more obvious it becomes that it's redundant and takes the whole thing a bit too far. It could and should have ended already in a surgery or a non-literal postal package.
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It’s quite contrived, especially the ending, but the curiosity is pinned at a pretty decent level and the story even manages to pleasantly surprise with the fate of the main characters. Carey Mulligan is good (though I couldn’t shake the feeling that she looks old compared to her peers) and, if we consider how close the premise was to uncontrolled feminist bollocks, everything holds convincingly together and without slipping into the realm of cheap parody. A good #metoo snack that won’t gratuitously piss-off the boys. :) 75%
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