Promising Young Woman, a story about sexual assault and exploitation

Carey Mulligan sets out to make men pay in this clever psychological thriller.

Carey Mulligan stars as Cassandra in director Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. Image: Merie Weismiller Wallace / Courtesy of Focus Features

Emerald Fennell prefers questions to answers: as a filmmaker, an actor and a spectator, she’s interested in ambiguity rather than certainty.

In Promising Young Woman, her feature debut as a writer-director, she’s created a scorching take on revenge and accountability, on predators and enablers and a woman who wants vengeance. Yet she’s reluctant to be too definitive about the movie’s subject matter, even if that’s what people often seem to expect of her.

“I know what I feel and think, and what I think is wrong and right,” she says. “But the film opens up a conversation much more than it finishes one. And for me the best thing I could do was to pose a question. As an audience member, I much prefer it when I leave thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t quite know what the answer is’.”

Promising Young Woman was clearly a talking point from the moment it premiered at Sundance last year. It is a heightened, unpredictable tale, a blackly comic drama with a ferocious performance from Carey Mulligan at its centre.

Mulligan’s character, Cassie, works at a coffee shop during the day and haunts bars and clubs by night. It’s as if she’s leading a double life, performing a self. In the opening sequence, at the end of a long night out, she’s slurring, slumping, almost insensible: her helpless state attracts the attention of male observers at the venue. Some are contemptuous of her messy vulnerability; others appear concerned,

Jerry (Adam Brody) appears to be one of the latter. He offers to see Cassie home and make sure she’s all right. Then they make a detour to his place. She seems barely aware of what’s happening, “What are you doing?” she murmurs a couple of times, drifting in and out of consciousness, as he begins to undress her. Suddenly, her tone changes. “What are you doing?” she says sharply, sitting bolt upright. She’s not the vulnerable figure he can take advantage of: that she’s there to challenge and confront him, perhaps even make him pay for his actions. This is her mission.

That question, “What are you doing?” resonates throughout the movie. And the answer, as Fennell sees it, is not as straightforward as it might be.

Before Promising Young Woman, she wrote and directed a short film, Careful How You Go, that showed at Sundance in 2018, and in the wake of that, she started pitching her feature. Margot Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap Entertainment, came on board.

But Fennell began her career as an actor, spotted by an agent when she was doing theatre productions at Oxford University. Her father, Theo Fennell, is a designer of luxury jewellery and silverware: her mother, Louise, is a fashion consultant who has published two novels.

She played a range of roles on television and in film. She was Princess Merkalova in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina; Vanessa Bell, sister of Elizabeth Debicki’s Virginia Woolf, in Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia; and Patsy Mount in five seasons of Call the Midwife. She can currently be seen as Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown.

She was also writing, whether she was working on YA fiction or a TV drama screenplay. Her friend Phoebe Waller-Bridge — whom she met on the set of Albert Nobbs, a period drama starring Glenn Close that they both had small roles in — brought her on board for the second season of Killing Eve, her hit TV series of espionage, intrigue, obsession and violent black comedy. Fennell ended up writing six episodes and serving as executive producer for season two.

This blackly comic drama features a ferocious performance by Carey Mulligan. Picture: Merie Weismiller Wallace/Focus Features

With Promising Young Woman, Fennell says, she set out to work with contrasts, to subvert the tropes of the revenge drama and give the audience a range of experiences. “What I wanted to do was to make a really honest psychological thriller and a romance and a comedy, all of those things.” To make it work, you play with opposites, “so that much of the exercise of it is applying pressure and releasing it, supplying information and withholding it.”

She wants the film to be enjoyable. “If you are going to talk about discomfiting things, you don’t want it to be dour, or for it to feel like medicine.” Aesthetically, she works with vivid, colourful production design and a playful soundtrack that can suggest a romantic take on Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind or repurpose Britney Spears’s Toxic.

There are things she wants to withhold, that she feels wary about depicting, that she chooses not to show, because not everything has to be seen and spelled out to have an impact. And, although this is a story about sexual assault and exploitation, its dynamic can apply in other areas.

When it came to finding an actor to portray the complex, contradictory Cassie, Fennell is very happy to be able to draw on “the genius of Carey”, her ability to bring out not only every nuance but also every extreme, excessive possibility.

She and Mulligan had crossed paths years earlier when they both made brief appearances in a 2006 Lynda La Plante crime series called Trial and Retribution. They played friends who had a fight in a nightclub, before Mulligan’s character was murdered; neither remembered the connection until halfway through the shoot of Promising Young Woman.

Cassie’s trajectory is not a straightforward one.

When she meets a friend from the old days, Ryan (Bo Burnham), his interest in her begins to take the edge off her single-minded quest. Yet at the same time, memories of the past resurface more clearly. We discover that she dropped out of medical school, for reasons that gradually become clear.

Cassie is short for Cassandra, the woman who in Greek mythology who had been given the gift of foresight, then condemned never to be believed: it’s a reference, Fennell says, that was deliberately chosen.

Part of what drives Promising Young Women is the disconnect between perception and action: the widespread inability to come to terms with the idea that “people can seem to be good people and do bad things”, the way that individuals are unable to take responsibility for what they do.

The disconnect was important to understand and represent, she says. She told every actor that, no matter what kind of person they were playing, “You think you’re a good person, You really, really do”.

Cassie isn’t always looking to punish, Fennell says; she’s also looking for affirmation, “for someone to say to her, ‘You’re right to be angry, you’re right to still be grieving.’ Nobody will admit it and that’s what has driven her mad.

“I hope this is a film about how people respond to something, as much as the thing itself. The trauma of it being denied and questioned and undermined is what makes people feel so isolated and frightened and alone.”

But it’s also a movie of tonal shifts and abrupt turns, “I wanted it to feel like an unbelievably dark comedy, and I wanted to see how far we could go. I suppose that’s the thing I’m interested in; the moment so hideous that if we could laugh afterwards, the laughter is a kind of recognition of truth as well.”

Promising Young Woman is showing in cinemas nationally.