Sundance Review: Promising Young Woman
Promising Young Woman
Premieres Category
Written/Directed by Emerald Fennell
It’s a tale older than mud. “She was too drunk to drive, so I offered her a ride home, we ended up back at my place, we had night caps, one thing lead to another…” and there we have it. He gets another notch on his bedpost and she has nothing that can definitively prove that he is not another innocuous ‘nice guy.’ What is a woman to do? How is she supposed to pretend that this is not happening in bars, clubs and colleges every single night? How is she supposed to operate in a culture that perpetuates women being violated, disbelieved and disregarded and pretend like nothing is happening? Don’t have an answer? Cassie does.
She is in bars actively curing the men who are suffering under the delusion that they are operating within a vast grey area. She acts too wasted to walk, and when some gentleman thinks he’s plied her with enough booze/illicit substances to make his move - she scares the pants back on him. She is the bait and the switch. She is vengeance. She is Batman. Cassandra Thomas’s (Carey Mulligan) secret identity is nothing to write home about, though. Or leave home about. She’s dropped out of med school, she lives with her parents, she wears an apron at work, and most damning of all, she’s given up on love. Do you have expectations? Forget them. Emerald Fennell’s rom-com/frat comedy/psychological revenge thriller Promising Young Woman eats your expectations for breakfast.
The rom-com plot begins at the coffee shop with the requisite meet cute, or rather, re-meet cute when Ryan (Bo Burnham) reminds her that they had classes together in med school and she gives him terrible customer service. The chemistry between Mulligan and Burnham is playful and adorable. Burnham’s frenetic nervous energy is a natural fit for Ryan, who can’t help but cut jokes to relieve the tension of being desperately head over heels for Cassie and, despite his finishing med school to become a pediatric oncologist, is still not in her league. We can’t help but root for Ryan because as Cassie is disarmed, we are disarmed.
The casting of Promising Young Woman is dastardly delightful, using likable, familiar faces - Alison Brie, Molly Shanon, Alfred Molina, Max Greenfield - to lull us into a false sense of security. Adam Brody can’t be a sleazeball, right? The O.C.! He’s a Gilmore guy for goodness sake! Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge as Cassie’s parents are just the right amount of awkward and a little too excited when their socially isolated, listless, little thirty year old finally brings a boy home, and a doctor at that! His parents must be proud.
The most captivating and unsettling performance is Carey Mulligan as Cassie. It will leave you deeply and utterly unsettled. The way she can just slip seamlessly from lovey-dovey, to devious, to mad as hell makes Cassie impossible to pin down. You are worried that you don’t know what she’s capable of and terrified that you do.
The true venom of Promising Young Woman comes from writer/director Emerald Fennell’s fluency when it comes to using style, pop culture and cinematic tropes to both engage and ensnare her audience. Do not be lured by the pretty colors and candy coating - this is a pill that is hard to swallow. The conversation at the bleeding heart of Promising Young Woman is about culpability. When a man commits sexual assault and then clears the exceedingly low bar for plausible deniability, then where does the culpability stop? Unbeknownst to you, Fennell will have you turning the judgmental gaze on yourself. How are you culpable by patronizing a film, laughing at a joke, or indulging in a fantasy that perpetuates a culture that sees sexual violence? Can it ever be all in good fun?
Promising Young Woman will be distributed by Focus Features on April 17th.
