A Promising Young Woman and the culture we can never escape...

Trigger Warning: This review and post contain discussions of rape, depression, and suicide.

Revenge is a dish best served cold...At least that's what we were always told right? But what happens when revenge isn’t ours to serve but we still feel beholden to it because we suffer from the ripple effects of the initial injustice? That’s the real premise behind Emerald Fennell’s, A Promising Young Woman. The injustice here is rape culture, toxic masculinity, and the ties that bind us as a society to sacred oaths too often broken.

Beware of spoilers ahead....

Make no mistake, the trailers want you to believe you’re going to watch a classic revenge thriller. Carey Mulligan's character, Cassie is seductive, sweet, complicated, and alluring when she explains to us that,

“Every weekend, I get dressed up, I go to a club and pretend that I’m too drunk to know any better and every weekend a ‘nice guy’ offers to help me.”

But this isn’t a revenge thriller so much a serious commentary on the untold casualties of rape culture and everything that women feel, ALL OF THE TIME.

Cassie suffers like many of us, not from a rape history but from loving and caring for someone who was raped, not believed, emotionally shattered, and forgotten. With the statistics being 1 in 3 women will have been sexually assaulted at least 1 time in their life, chances are we all know and care for someone who has been raped. Survivor guilt, coupled with constant helplessness, and fear, is the emotional cocktail that all women are walking around in society, feeling. But Cassie has no time to deal with her survivor guilt, her grief, or even her fear. She takes all of those feelings and squashes them beneath the stone-cold anger she feels for the men who continue to take advantage of women just like her best friend, Nina.

Writer and director, Fennell walks a fine line of challenging us to question Cassie’s mental health or mental clarity the whole time as we watch her masterfully manipulate multiple perceived and actual foes from her past. Is it just as evil to trick an old confidant into thinking she mistakenly had a hotel hook up after a boozy lunch? Cassie takes her role in payback or educating through payback very seriously. Have a few too many drinks and it’s kind of your fault. Hey, it can happen to anyone, right? This scene is painful to watch and waivers on sociopathy.

Having left the hallowed halls of medical school and never returned, she now coerces the dean of the school’s daughter into her car and ferries her away to a safe location, only to give her high-powered mom a good fright. She leaves having taught her the lesson that internalized misogyny is really bad for women, like really bad. After hearing that the dean refused to press charges against Nina’s assailant, because,

“We get 4 or 5 of these kinds of accusations a week. We really have to give these men the benefit of the doubt with accusations like this.”

The dean isn’t so keen on that benefit of the doubt when she believes that her daughter might be in a college dorm room with copious amounts of alcohol and 4 other men. Watching a terrified Connie Britton beg for her daughter's safety is excruciating. Has Cassie truly done her job now to educate these women on the dangers of not being "a woman who stands with other women?" If that's the lesson here, it's lost because this too is a real manipulatively cruel scene to watch.

Lastly, through Cassie, Fennell challenges the idea that public covenants of honor and decorum don’t really matter in a society that all but worships rape culture. Imagine being the victim of an assault as a med student and knowing that your attacker is now a Doctor who swore to “Do No Harm”? Or you happen to be now dating one of the group of doctors who shared a video of the attack among friends.

This film is polarizing but one thing is certain, Emerald Fennell is telling us plainly, that we cannot escape rape culture. Whether we be the victim or not, the casualties of rape are far and wide. They can actually be as powerful and catastrophic as the blast zone around an explosion. We can’t escape it. It will touch us. We will all be victims in some way or another. It’s painful and powerful all at once and this movie will sit with you long after you see it - if you let it.

In many interviews, Fennell has said she wishes that people view this movie as a satirical thriller with a dark comedic thread. It’s dark, really dark, and the comedy is there to see, but when this is your reality, can you really laugh at this?

Movies like this are not used to being celebrated on Academy Award stages and this one deserves to be right there with the other Best Picture Nominees. I am so pleased that the AAMPAS isn’t afraid to lean into this film’s content and see it for what it is, important, complicated, and timely. This film isn't going to be loved by all and a simple Google search will lead you down a plethora of visceral reactions. I would argue that’s what good art does.

And there’s the opinion you didn’t ask for...xo Kristi