Emerald Fennell’s feature film Promising Young Woman has been buzzed about since its premiere at Sundance. The pandemic delayed its initial release, but the film is getting a wide release this Christmas. The trailer promises a neon-pink-soaked tale about a woman traveling down the path to hell to get her revenge. Unfortunately Promising Young Woman doesn’t deliver in its promises. While its high femme aesthetic and well-picked soundtrack make the film initially appealing, what lies between the surface is an upsetting take on rape-revenge that silences the voice of a survivor and takes away agency even further by letting others tell her story. Fennell’s initial desire to subvert the patriarchy reveals itself to be misunderstanding the subject of sexual violence and rape culture.
Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a woman who is seemingly done on her luck, living at home, and working as a barista at a local coffee joint. But, this is the life she wants. It allows her to be unassuming during the day and a vigilante at night. She goes to clubs and bars pretending to be drunk, and when a man brings her home to have sex, she reveals her sobriety and delivers them a lecture on consent.
Her motivation is to avenge her friend Nina, never shown in the film, who was raped while they were in medical school. Even after Nina reported the assault, no one believed her, from deans to friends, so she left school. Cassie has decided to avenge Nina, spending years looking for some type of closure.
Along the way she reconnects with old classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham), who brings a spark of joy back into her life. She puts aside her resentment and lets herself breathe. But when new details about Nina’s assault arise, Cassie runs back to her mission of vengeance.
While there are rape-revenge films where women avenge a friend, this is a particularly egregious case of making someone else’s trauma your own. Sure, Cassie says this is for Nina, but after years of preying on men, this is no longer about vengeance but about making herself feel better. Nina, the one who was assaulted, is faceless and voiceless, talked about, not to. It’s disheartening to see a film like this prioritize other voices over that of a survivor. It conveys a disturbing message about who can tell whose story.
A lot of truths are told in Promising Young Woman: men take advantage of young women, rape culture is entrenched in our society, authority figures ignore accusations of violence, and sexual assault is often brushed off with a “she was drunk” or “she was asking for it.” Fennell takes many of her queues from the current discourse, particularly surrounding the #MeToo movement as she wants to shine a light on the reality women face. For some survivors, this will feel cathartic and empowering. For the other survivors, including myself, this will feel like a gross misunderstanding of its sensitive subject matter.
The film’s ending is by far its most upsetting aspect. Yes, the ending seems subversive and unexpected, but it also completely negates the message that the film has been trying to convey. Much of the film is about the complexities of empowerment and revenge. There is a compelling tale here about the realization that revenge is self destructive as Cassie begins to realize how much of her life is defined by vengeance. While Cassie’s character is far from perfect, she’s experiencing some sort of growth and gradual understanding of the consequences of her actions. But, the story quickly turns around and deems self-sacrifice a necessity to achieve any semblance of justice. There is no hope in the ending, only the heart-sinking realization that living and coping with trauma is virtually impossible.
The final nail in the coffin is pairing this message about trauma with a winky face and an “xoxo.” The entire film employs a femme aesthetic as Cassie is often shown wearing pink with her hair in pigtails. This is playing up her appearance of innocence while also enforcing that femininity does not connote weakness. Again, this works for a majority of the film. But, with an ending that so quickly turns into tragedy, continuing to employ this aesthetic to somehow give it a positive spin is insulting and drains away my own hope for a better life as a sexual assault survivor.
Its individual parts are sleek and well done. Aspects of romantic comedy subvert expectations for a film about sexual assault in a fascinating examination of eventually finding joy after trauma. Mulligan and Burnham are stunning, particularly when they dance and sing Paris Hilton’s “The Stars Are Blind” together in a drug store. Each of these aspects make Promising Young Woman sound amazing on paper. But when they all come together, it unfortunately just falls apart.
There’s no denying that Promising Young Woman is gutsy. Fennell took massive risks with the script to create a new twist on the revenge tale, which is admirable in and of itself. She made a film where it seems like she couldn’t care less what people think. But maybe she should have cared a little bit more.
