Promising Young Woman, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, opens rather ominously at a watering hole. Three predators have just clocked their dazed, incapacitated prey and are debating how to proceed. Suddenly, the most circumspect of the trio asserts his alpha status, not to attack, it seems, but to protect. The watering hole is a bar. The predators are guffawing brochachos in business casual. The prey is a woman so drunk and disheveled, as helpless to stand as a newborn fawn, that we barely recognize her as Carey Mulligan. The noble beast is an archetypal “nice guy” (Adam Brody) who wants to make sure she gets home safe.
A passing familiarity with the gender-political discourse of the past decade will suffice to spoil the surprise: The nice guy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. “Nice guy” is, in fact, just a disguise, a ploy, like Jeffrey Epstein’s philanthropy or Ted Bundy’s sling. Yet there’s a secondary surprise, a sting in the tail: Cassie, our heroine, is in disguise, too, not to mention sober enough to perform brain surgery. She has ensnared this man, not vice versa, in order to shock his conscience or at least terrorize him into good behavior. He isn’t the first. It’s a hobby of hers.
Or maybe “calling” is the right word. Once upon a time, Cassie was a medical student, but the unpunished gang rape of her beloved friend Nina sent her out of school and into a monomaniacal rage. Now about 30, she lives with her parents, played with baffled desperation by Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge, works as a barista, and presents as clinically depressed. By night, she is an instrument of vigilante justice.
If this sounds like a pulpy premise, one need only recall how many hundreds of movies aimed at a male audience are little more than crude, lizard-brained revenge fantasies. In fact, the “rape and revenge” subgenre boasts, alongside exploitative schlock such as Death Wish (1974) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), such sophisticated classics as Ingmar Bergman’s haunting, folkloric The Virgin Spring (1960) and Sam Peckinpah’s pressure-cooker Straw Dogs (1971). The basic mechanics of violation and revenge, of talionic justice, are the stuff of Jacobean or Shakespearean tragedy. The premise is only as pulpy as its execution. So, what has Promising Young Woman set out to do, and does it succeed?
The movie is undeniably didactic and likely intended for a younger audience, as most of what it says explicitly or otherwise is already conventional wisdom among anyone above college age. We know that sexual assault is widespread. We know that institutions sweep it under the rug. We know that appeals to standards of proof and due process are often suspected of bad faith, as is any advice or warning that might be construed as repressive victim-blaming. When the medical school dean (Connie Britton), whom Cassie buttonholes and harangues, nervously reminds her that the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty, Cassie snorts that there’s no arguing with that. If Cassie’s contempt for legal principle rubs you the wrong way, try to imagine Clint Eastwood saying the same line.
As escapist, wish-fulfilling entertainment, Promising Young Woman works, but only intermittently. Cassie’s fake-drunk ruse is an inventive touch. Whenever she snaps out of it, the men react as one would to Satan’s voice coming out of Regan MacNeil. The movie presents a sort of taxonomy of toxic men. There’s a fedora guy. Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad’s McLovin) does a nasty turn as a coked-up aspiring author who idolizes David Foster Wallace. A road-raging MAGA type calls Cassie the C-word in traffic. Then there are the central-casting construction workers and their unwanted double entendres.
These are types, not characters. The same goes for Cassie’s former medical school classmate (Alison Brie), who is made the mouthpiece for a torrent of obliviously sexist sentiment before revealing that she helped conceal evidence of Nina’s gang rape. No, a thriller need not have well-rounded or morally complicated characters — action movies get along just fine with goons and henchmen — but Promising Young Woman misses an opportunity to emphasize that the perpetrators of sexual violence don’t look like types. They look like anyone and everyone.
The movie flirts with this point, or thinks it does, when it introduces Cassie’s love interest, Ryan (Bo Burnham), another former medical school classmate, who pursues her with precisely the right ratio of persistence and fatalism (cf. Josh Neff in The Last Days of Disco: “I can be easily discouraged. I will take no for an answer”). He’s handsome but awkward, almost off-puttingly harmless, and on top of all that, a pediatric surgeon. To whom is it supposed to come as a shock when this guy, to put it mildly, disappoints Cassie? In everything from Law and Order reruns to HBO’s The Undoing, this is exactly what a rapist is supposed to look like.
So, the villains of Promising Young Woman announce themselves too loudly, whether by being awful or by being too good to be true, and the movie has absolutely no element of surprise worth the name. Ultimately, Cassie will get what she wants: Nina’s rapist handcuffed to a bed, while Cassie stands over him, disguised now as a stripper, with a case full of surgical tools at her disposal. But by this point, the man on the bed may as well be a mannequin, a lifeless symbol, like most everyone else in this film, and the movie’s ghoulish final twist can’t quite compensate for that.
To give credit where it’s due, though, the most compelling element of Promising Young Woman is right there in the title. Many of its lessons are received wisdom, expounded in wooden dialogue for the slowest or youngest viewers. But the aftershocks of a violent crime or sexual assault are dramatized more subtly. Cassie’s parents and Nina’s mother (Molly Shannon) are broken down not only by the crime itself but by the way it has derailed Cassie’s life, canceled all her plans, and wasted her promise. The movie falls short of the catharsis it promises, but it delivers a quietly serious note that’s impossible not to hear.