Promising Young Woman (2020): Beneath the Neon Lights
Image courtesy of Focus Features
By Nick Sansone
Amidst the tumultuous change that has rocked the film industry over the last half-decade or so, one major trend that has greatly excited me as a film critic is the amount of remarkable features from first-time filmmakers with fully-formed storytelling talent. From Jordan Peele’s zeitgeist-capturing social satire Get Out (2017) and Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age memory film Lady Bird (2017) to Bo Burnham’s Generation Z-defining Eighth Grade (2018) and Bora Kim’s achingly personal House of Hummingbird (2020), there have been an astounding number of exciting new cinematic voices setting incredibly high bars with their debut features. And while only Peele and Gerwig of the above managed to translate their debut successes into serious awards consideration (with Peele even winning an Oscar for his screenplay), the fact that they were both nominated for the Best Director Oscar shows that consideration on the highest levels of the awards circuit is possible for a debuting filmmaker.
Enter Emerald Fennell and her debut feature film Promising Young Woman (2020), which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was originally intended for theatrical release in April of that year before being pulled due to the then-nascent COVID-19 pandemic. Then, smartly realizing that the positive buzz from Sundance could possibly translate to awards consideration, distributor Focus Features waited to release the film in select open theaters and video-on-demand until the end of the year, turning what could have been a modest early-year arthouse hit into a five-time Oscar-nominated awards-season juggernaut. And this film more than deserves this awards attention, as it addresses the current zeitgeist (toxic masculinity, rape culture, and the Me Too movement, in particular) with pitch-black comedy, blistering satire, and bold, daring narrative choices that will certainly divide some film viewers, but ultimately add up to make this one of the most exciting and original films in years.
Image courtesy of Focus Features
The film’s critique of toxic masculinity and rape culture reveals itself right at the beginning, as the opening credits play over images of butts and crotches bumping up against each other in a club, before a group of young men, speaking about women in misogynistic and degrading language, see a woman we will come to know as Cassie (Carey Mulligan) sitting on a bench, appearing greatly intoxicated. After a brief debate about who could take her home, one of the men approaches her and offers to call her an Uber. However, he uses the opportunity to take her to his apartment, where he attempts to take advantage of her drunkenness by forcing himself on her before she reveals that she’s sober, scaring him straight and walking away unharmed. The film quickly reveals that this is what Cassie does every night, as her way of forcing men to think twice before they take advantage of drunk women.
While the exact motivation for Cassie’s actions here is slowly revealed throughout the film (and I won’t spoil them here), the film wastes little time in revealing her current circumstances: she is a barista at a hipster coffee shop who dropped out of medical school years earlier due to a traumatic event involving her now-deceased best friend, Nina. Now approaching thirty years old, single, and still living at home, everyone from her parents to her boss and close friend Gail (Laverne Cox) is encouraging her to move out, get on the dating scene and start living like an adult. Around the same time, an old classmate from medical school named Ryan (Bo Burnham) shows up at Cassie’s coffee shop and asks her out on a date. Despite her initial hesitation, Cassie accepts and finds herself genuinely attracted to him. But before long, Ryan casually mentions that another former classmate of theirs, Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), is getting married soon. Just the mention of this name reopens old wounds for Cassie, and sets her on a path of directly confronting old demons and getting revenge for his role in Nina’s sexual trauma.
That is as far as I will go into the plot, as a large part of the joy of watching this film is seeing the various ways in which Cassie enacts this revenge. She spares absolutely no one, holding everybody at all levels accountable for their roles in enabling a system that fails to provide justice for sexual assault survivors and accountability for perpetrators. And just one of the brilliant choices that Fennell makes in her screenplay is subverting the audience’s expectations as to just who enabled the system that failed to provide justice for Nina. Other than the typical obnoxious, misogynistic, fraternity-brother guys like the ones she lures and scares every night, Fennell shows how even powerful, “feminist” women like the school dean or a successful female student can end up complicit in the trauma of survivors, often by simply believing the men over the survivors regardless of the facts or how many people witnessed the assault.
Image courtesy of Focus Features
And while this is certainly heavy subject matter and Promising Young Woman has some very dark and intense moments, it is also not the type of film to wallow in pain or melodrama. This is, at its core, an angry film, one that blends genres and tones in a way that is meant to shock and provoke viewers from all backgrounds and experiences. Just as Cassie holds everyone accountable for their complicity in Nina’s trauma, Fennell forces the viewer to think about their role in real-life systems of injustice, and she does so by taking them on a wild, unpredictable journey through this film where nothing is quite as it seems. One of her main ways of doing so is through the film’s main subplot, which consists of Cassie’s initially-hesitant-then-blossoming romance with Ryan. Having clearly studied her share of romantic comedies, Fennell employs many a romcom-trope in this subplot to great and disarming effect, allowing viewers to let their guard down at several key points, which makes it all the more jarring and effective when the film strikes its crucial blows.
Adding to the disarming nature in a key way is the film’s production design and mise en scène, which consists of a mostly light, candy-colored, neon landscape, particularly in Cassie’s home, the coffee shop, and in one key scene that takes place in a pharmacy with Cassie and Ryan (set to, of all things, a Paris Hilton song). Not only does this scenery mirror the façade that Cassie has put up to hide her traumatized internal self, but it also brilliantly and painfully reflects the façade that society forces sexual assault survivors to put up on a daily basis. And as the film barrels toward its climax, one that is both shocking and inevitable (and has certainly polarized audiences), it becomes even clearer how this film serves as a cautionary tale not only to predatory men who take advantage of vulnerable women, but also to society at large for denying the trauma and rage of survivors until they explode.
And carrying this film with unbelievable firepower is Carey Mulligan. Having admired her as an actress ever since her breakout role in An Education (2009) and throughout the various costume dramas that she’s starred in, seeing her take a modern role that allows her to use every single gift that she has as an actress and nail it completely is an absolute thrill to watch. From the first moment in the film’s pre-credits scene when she reveals her sobriety to the “nice guy” who took her home thinking she was wasted, she commands every frame of this film, embodying every ounce of pain and righteous anger present in Fennell’s screenplay throughout. Even in her scenes with Laverne Cox and Bo Burnham where she gets to showcase more of her sweet and comedic persona (and some fantastic chemistry with both of them), her brokenness is still very much present, as she knows she will never be happy until she gets justice for Nina, something that she knows deep down she will never truly achieve. Mulligan deserves every award she receives for this performance.
Image courtesy of Focus Features
Almost equally as powerful in a quieter sense is Bo Burnham, whose performance as Ryan has been sadly but unsurprisingly overlooked this awards season. While Mulligan commands the film and the numerous male actors clearly serve to prove its thesis regarding toxic masculinity and rape culture, Burnham’s character serves another key purpose, one that slowly reveals itself throughout the film and one that is revealed as much by Fennell’s screenplay as by Burnham’s performance. In playing this role as an archetypal cute, boyish “nice guy,” he both sets up the film as being a sweet romantic comedy, mostly thanks to near-flawless chemistry with Mulligan, while also serving a crucial role in destroying it. All the while, he single-handedly dismantles every male screenwriter’s fantasy of winning over the mysterious, damaged, manic, pixie dream girl who can help him solve his problems while providing him romantic and sexual gratification. It is a brilliant, understated piece of acting from someone who has already proven to be an exciting filmmaker in his own right.
On top of that, smaller supporting performances from Alison Brie, Laverne Cox, and one especially heartbreaking scene with Alfred Molina round out an outstanding ensemble cast that has great moments while never overshadowing Mulligan as the film’s heart and soul. And the film’s note-perfect editing by Frédéric Thoraval and kinetic cinematography by Benjamin Kračun greatly add to an overall experience that is devastating and immensely entertaining all at once. In many ways, Promising Young Woman is a film that is perfect for this moment in time, not solely in how it addresses the Me Too movement and our now-expanding societal discourse around sexual trauma and rape culture, but the way it goes about doing so. As people’s social media feeds regularly go from images of horror and violence and injustice to cute and funny and upbeat videos, they become well-accustomed to genre and tone-jumping, but Fennell does it with such intelligence, skill, and righteousness here that it ultimately creates a shocking and powerful effect that will linger for a long time afterward. And while many films, even during awards season, are forgotten with the next film viewed, Cassie’s chaotic story of trauma and revenge demands to be remembered, and it almost certainly will be.
Nick Sansone is a writer and aspiring filmmaker from Chicago. A recent summa cum laude graduate of DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts, he continues to study film independently and has appeared on different radio programs in the Chicagoland area to discuss contemporary cinema and the Academy Awards.