Like so many of us (most of us?) I am experiencing that brick wall pandemic fatigue that everyone is talking about. When the malaise hits like this in winter (a snowy one at that) I find myself craving a useless distraction, an obsession: something to get my blood up about and feel alive over. Unlike my usual entertainment (any and all Bravo programming, all 40 seasons of Survivor, rewatching The Sopranos for a ninth time), when I get this dead inside I need to be mad at whatever it is. Sometimes, in my darkest hours, I simply need to pick apart a work of media that I can’t respect on any level. Rage therapy!
Luckily for me, a dear friend started texting me unprompted about Promising Young Woman last week as I was making dinner, and in her passion over the subject, sent me a series of voice texts to properly express her anger at what she had just watched. I knew right away from the tenor of her voice that this much hyped movie might be just the ticket, a perfect target for my displaced anger and nervous energy. A couple days later, another kind internet friend sent me a link so I wouldn’t have to shell out $20 for trash. Frank fired up the projector, we settled in on the couch with Pablo and a bowl of popcorn, and proceeded to eviscerate our brains with one of the most heinous productions I’ve seen in a long time.
For some background, the trailer started circulating in some of my groups (I belong to an array of private Facebook groups, Slacks, and gossip newsletters so that I can beef with strangers over things like whether or not Timothee Chalamet is a sex symbol - he is, don’t @ me) in October of 2020. My first impression from the trailer was that it was a sort of drug-laden cocktail for millennials with no attention span. I was confused as to how they got Carey Mulligan (who I consider a prestige actress) to play the main character, and the rest felt pretty cheap. Doing a spooky remix of Toxic by Queen Britney Jean Spears entirely on violin? I don’t like to be pandered to in this way, but I guess my generational cohort does. Otherwise, I was under the impression that this was to be a sort of an empowering dark revenge comedy, almost in the vein of 2019’s Ready or Not, but with a #MeToo spin. It was not.
From this section on, there will be spoilers. Please do not read beyond this point if you want to go into this thing blind!
(For what it’s worth, I don’t think knowing / not knowing anything about the plot will make your experience of the film any better. However, if you’re sensitive to violence against women, this is probably not something you want to watch - or maybe you want to know what’s going to happen before you decide to.)
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Promising Young Woman starts off straightforward enough, giving us exactly what the trailer depicts for the first twenty minutes, at which point the film takes a sharp left. From the trailer and the beginning of the movie, we’re introduced to Cassandra. Cassandra is thirty, and was in medical school to become a doctor until her friend Nina died following a traumatic sexual assault at a fraternity, at which point she dropped out (or they both dropped out after the assault, and then Nina died after? It was unclear to me). I’m not even going to stop here and explain how ridiculous it is to posit that medical schools have active fraternity life, because I’d never finish writing this post if I addressed every glaring unreality in this movie.
From there, we understand that Cassie’s life is circling the drain. She’s working as a barista in a coffee shop and living at home with her parents. First of all, I have to laugh that her rock bottom is quite literally the current reality of millions of millennials (who are the target demographic for this film), but maybe that’s just winking strategy.
Her parents are concerned about where their med school genius went, and why she doesn’t have a boyfriend. At night, she goes out to different bars and clubs and sort of pool-sharks men into taking her home thinking she is blackout drunk. Once they’re about to date rape her (read: she pretends to be asleep or to pass out, and they all try to fuck her anyway), she “wakes up” and berates them, revealing she has been stone cold sober the entire time. We’re supposed to believe this is cathartic for her in some way, but it is clear that it is only bringing her deeper into her existential spiral. It was the opposite of empowering for me to watch, and I’m still not sure how women watching were supposed to feel about this segment? We don’t assume that because we are not wasted, we are safe with a random man. We’re afraid of men when we’re sober too. None of it made sense, but I went with it knowing this was black comedy territory and it was supposed to be not-quite-real.
Here’s where I began to lose my mind at an ever-increasing pace:
At the coffee shop where Cassie works, she runs into a guy named Ryan (Bo Burnham, sporting the most punchable, forgettable face I’ve seen since Colin Jost’s but I guess that’s the point) who she knows from medical school. Naturally, he asks her why she isn’t working in medicine, and she evades him and inexplicably spits in his coffee, which I guess is supposed to be her showing her disdain for all cis men. Subtle and poetic! He drinks the coffee with her spit in it, and asks her out. She says yes, and we get the sense that he’s not going to be one of her marks, but that this is genuinely how she treats even the men she intends to become potentially intimate with.
What stands out to me from this point of the film onward, is how unbelievably poor the writing is. I was positively stunned, partially because the screenplay itself received so much acclaim and hype in my circles prior to release. Being familiar with the work of Emerald Fennell (who wrote and directed this movie, as well as wrote the excellent and critically acclaimed television show Killing Eve), this miss is surprising and one wonders if it was done on purpose. I can’t find another explanation for it, because I know Fennell understands how people speak to one another from previous projects. Their interaction is full of stuttering starts-and-stops, like a college improv production all too aware of it’s “realistic” physical tics. I kept wondering if the movie was camp or not.
Here’s an example from the coffee-flirting scene:
Cass: Do you want milk?
Ryan: Pardon?
Cass: Do you want milk? In your coffee?
Ryan: No, but you can spit in it if you want. I deserve that.
:: Cassie spits in coffee ::
Ryan: Do you want to go on a date?
Another friend of mine posited the following theory: “Don’t you get the feeling this MUST have been a rewrite? Like some rich kid bought the idea / rough draft or script and threw money at is and *boom* ta-da garbage!”
I can’t find evidence of this anywhere on the IMDB page or on Wikipedia that this hypothesis is true, but it does sometimes feel like that to the viewer, most acutely in the dialogue. To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before had a more believable script.
Okay, so on the first date between Cassie and Ryan, things go decently well. He does allude to the fact that he still hangs out with his friends from medical school (the same group of guys involved in Nina’s assault, and therefore, subsequent death) and Cassie notes this, paying particular attention to the news that the main ringleader (Al) is getting married in a couple of weeks to a “bikini model” and that Ryan will be attending the wedding.
This is the point at which Cassie starts crafting her revenge fantasy, which we don’t get to see fully laid out as a plan. Inexplicably to me, part one of her directing her vitriolic hatred hinges on her getting revenge on the women around her who didn’t believe her and Nina back in school. To accomplish this, she gets her high-functioning Type A former friend (played by a typecast Alison Brie) wasted at lunch and then leaves her to get picked up by a guy and dropped in a hotel room. Cassie does this so that Alison Brie’s character will experience the utter psychological pain that is waking up somewhere unfamiliar and not knowing what happened. This is totally warranted to Cassie, because Brie’s character didn’t believe the report of Nina’s rape when it happened and blamed her for being too intoxicated. I get that Fennel is equating enablers with rapists here, but nothing else is going on emotionally in the scene so it feels weird.
Also, in what world would this make Brie’s character truly reconsider her feelings on victimhood and sexual assault? I think we’re all aware in 2021 that experiencing a sexual assault doesn’t necessarily make you more empathetic to survivors in the future - our current timeline is incredibly dark. Even more ridiculous, Cassie dodges Brie’s calls for weeks, leaving her to spiral about what happened. This is our anti-hero? I was starting to feel gipped. When Brie finally manages to confront her and Cassie tells her nothing happened with the man who brought her to the hotel room, Brie doesn’t even ask Cassie why she would do something like that to her, and barely holds her accountable for arranging it. She expresses no anger, only relief at the fact that ‘nothing happened’. Essentially, she acts like being kidnapped and rape-baited is akin to a friend leaving you at the bar because they decided they wanted to go home with someone. From what we know about Brie’s character (admittedly little, because everyone in this movie is one-dimensional, but picture a Bree Vanderkamp type), she’d be on the phone with her lawyer over this yesterday. The character development is completely absent. However, plot holes abound, and Cassie is left to continue on her merry path of destruction.
Where to next, you ask? Well, to traumatize another woman!
This time it’s Connie Britton, giving us a half-assed medical school dean with a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ attitude. Of course, Britton just so happens to have a teen daughter, so Cassie abducts her to teach Britton a lesson. When confronting Britton, Cassie claims she’s left her daughter at one of the fraternity houses on campus, so it’s a good thing that Britton has so much trust in those young men. As Britton starts to panic, Cassie reveals that her teen daughter is actually just sitting in a diner waiting for a boy band who will never show up. What a flex.
Finally, she directs her plan back towards the people who perpetrated the crime, instead of the ever-present chorus of doubters. Anyone who has lived for five minutes on Earth knows that disbelievers of women will continue to exist regardless of gender or offspring. It’s like an inverted argument for the outdated line of thinking that posits that straight men with daughters can’t sexually transgress. I yawn, and I seethe, and I wonder why they had to make Carey Mulligan look so bad in these wigs.
We’re at the climax of the film! Hold on tight because this is where Frank looked up at me several times to ask, politely, what the fuck we were watching. I’m going to pull the summary of the end from Wikipedia, because I am having trouble bringing myself to type it:
Cassie arrives at Al's bachelor party pretending to be a stripper, successfully drugging Al's friends and taking Al himself upstairs. She handcuffs him to a bed and eventually confesses who she is and why she is there, but as she tries to carve Nina's name into Al's stomach, he breaks free and suffocates her to death with a pillow. The next morning, Al's friend Joe finds him and, upon realizing what has happened, assures him that he "did nothing wrong" and helps Al cover up the murder by burning Cassie's body. Cassie's parents file a missing person report, and the police begin to investigate. A detective leniently questions Ryan at his work, but Ryan does not reveal to the detective where the missing Cassie might be and instead leads him into believing she was mentally unwell.
During Al's wedding reception, Ryan receives the first of a few scheduled texts from Cassie. It is revealed that before the bachelor party, Cassie had sent Green the phone with the video of Nina's rape, along with information on where she was going and who would be responsible if she went missing. Police arrest Al and find Cassie's burnt remains, while Joe runs off and Ryan receives a final scheduled text from Cassie, signed with her and Nina's names.
One thing missing from above: Ryan, Cassie’s date from the coffee shop, can be heard talking while he is holding the video camera for the sex tape, so we know he was involved. I also have to point out that Joe is played by Max Greenfield, aka Schmidt from New Girl. Horrifying.
The smothering scene, where Cassie dies via pillow, is heinous to watch. It was shot long, in a single scene without a cutaway as if this is Irreversible or an artistic, profound film that earned that kind of torture from us. It was egregious. It was the only time I was uncomfortable watching this shitty movie, and it felt kind of pornographic in its violence.
All of this is being explained away by blue check media critics as sharp cultural commentary, or intended disgust, or simply an unflinching portrait of modern gender dynamics and our collective thirst for vengeance and cancellation, but I have a hard time finding this movie had anything poignant to say. It says: “People rape and kill women and feel nothing over it.” Wow, you don’t say?
Possibly the most unrealistic part of all is when Joe comes in to find Al still chained by one hand to the bed next to a dead Cassie on his wedding day. He comes in with a finger-gun attitude of who’s the man, assuming Al and Cassie fucked (Joe still thinks she is a stripper, Al knows better but neglects to share that detail with Joe). When he realizes Cassie is actually dead, he reacts in a complete caricature of a serial killer. This is a comedic movie, so we’re supposed to kind of take this lack of concern for human life as a gross exaggeration of men’s attitudes towards the lives of women, but it just falls so flat. Are there really loads of men wandering around who wouldn’t react in horror at a surprise dead body? We know these types of people care about their own futures and reputations more than they care about the lives of others. There is no way anyone but a tremendously powerful member of the 1% (which Joe’s character is not - think Weinstein, Epstein) would be unbothered by the potential consequences of being caught.
Perhaps the most offensive part of the film is that we’re supposed to view Cassie’s death as a smackdown, her final text messages scheduled after death landing like a mic drop at Al’s failed wedding. It’s everything that was wrong with 13 Reasons Why, except instead of happening inside a group of overly dramatic teens growing into their own brains, it’s coming from full-formed thirty-somethings. Is that the point? Is this who we all are when we’re on Twitter?
Promising Young Woman hides under a clear and specific aesthetic point of view, like a Glossier lip balm: a sleekly marketed exterior hides the fact that the product inside is exorbitantly priced Vaseline. It adds an excellent soundtrack for even more obfuscation, and when it starts to flounder with that recipe, it injects cheap shock value to stun the viewer into submission.
If there had been an ounce more thought put into this, I could have seen a version working where the punchline was: Our appetites for the personal destruction of others have become so insatiable that even if we die in the process of enacting it, it’s still worthwhile to us.
Is that what Emerald Fennell was trying to say, but it got muffled under all the piss poor dialogue? This isn’t a rhetorical question - if you’ve seen the film, please reply, I am dying to know what you think. Did I miss something huge? Did I have my rage blinders on?
Let me know in the replies. Until next time!