Promising Young Woman: Revenge Fantasy Thriller Raises Post-#MeToo Questions Questionably

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

From Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag to the recent HBO mini-series The Flight Attendant, there’s a popular type of protagonist in contemporary dramedies – a smart, funny, traumatized, thirtyish, single mess.

She’s a woman so overwhelmed by regrets that she tries to escape by doing regrettable things. That’s part of the psychological key to Cassandra, the central character in the post-#MeToo black comedy, Promising Young Woman. There is, in fact, a Fleabag link: The movie was written and directed by Emerald Fennell, a showrunner for Waller-Bridge’s television series Killing Eve. (Fennell also played Camilla Parker Bowles in Netflix’s The Crown).

Cassandra, or Cassie, is played by Carey Mulligan, a dryly cynical med-school dropout who works in a coffee shop, lives with her folks, and has no friends, ambitions, or romantic life. Her performance — which earned a lot of buzz at Sundance last year and is being promoted for awards season — is the reason to see Promising Young Woman.

The movie around her is in the mode of what might be called candy-coated sarcasm. Featuring colour-saturated backdrops, bright clothes, and fizzy pop songs, it’s the perspective of a dark mind in an over-bright world.

Here’s a fun thing Cassie likes to do: She goes to a bar around closing time and feigns being falling-down drunk. She then allows some pretend-chivalrous predatory guy to take her home and when he tries to have sex with her in her semi-conscious state, she snaps awake and confronts him. It’s not like she films them and broadcasts it. She just makes the men angry and defensive, one jerk at a time.

There are some nuances here. Fennell hasn’t cast just any creepy guys but likeable former teen faves. The first is played by the handsome Adam Brody (The O.C.). The next is Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad) who poses as the male feminist, who talks about David Foster Wallace and how she’d be even more beautiful without make-up, before she nods out and he starts shoving his hands under her skirt.

Back at home, where she still lives with her worried but clueless parents (Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge), Cassie keeps records of each confrontation.

Eventually we learn Cassie’s odd, reckless behaviour has a cause: she’s suffering from post-traumatic depression and guilt relating to a terrible thing that was done seven years before to her best friend and fellow med student, a promising young woman named Nina.

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One day, former classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham) — now a pediatric doctor —comes into the coffee shop and asks Cassie out, even though she spits in his coffee. He’s goofy, sensitive, and self-deprecating and starts bringing Cassie out of her shell. She takes him to dinner with her parents and he compliments every dish. (“Your mom’s hot,” jokes Ryan, as if he already knew Coolidge played Stiffler’s mom in American Pie).

Even Cassie’s protective boss at work (Laverne Cox) likes Ryan. When he dances with her at a pharmacy at midnight while lip-syncing to a Paris Hilton song, you know he’s the one. Unless, of course, he’s too good to be true.

Ryan has also stayed in touch with their old classmates, including people who knew Nina. As Cassie begins to reconnect with characters from the past, of friends, parents, lawyers and college administrators — played by Molly Shannon, Alison Brie, Connie Britton and Alfred Molina —the film checks off different forms of denial and rationalization about sexual assault.

Promising Young Woman wobbles between its glib-bleak dichotomy, both in individual scenes and in the soundtrack, which mixes inane pop tunes with a conventional serious score. The third-act thriller conclusion is so inconsistent that it feels like an alternative ending to the real movie. It should be a conversation starter, though it won’t necessarily be a pleasant conversation.

What holds all this, mostly, together to the presence of Mulligan (An Education, Shame) and her own ambiguous performance. With her round cheeks, and her princess-like blonde hairdo, she can look childlike or mask-like in rage. She’s an avenging angel with a spark of mischief. Though the film has no voice-over, it’s tempting to see her as an unreliable first-person narrator, and the film itself can be thought of as much dark fantasy as plausible events.

Promising Young Woman. Directed and written by Emerald Fennell. Starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton, Adam Brody, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Alfred Molina, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Now playing in select theatres and available to stream from January 15.