Review: Promising Young Woman

Carey Mulligan stars as Cassie in Promising Young Woman

Promising Young Woman (MA15+)
National release
★★★★½

Promising Young Woman, the feature debut of English actor and screenwriter Emerald Fennell, who was the showrunner on season two of the hit TV series Killing Eve, is one of the best films I saw last year.

Its star, English actor Carey Mulligan, should be nominated for an Oscar. She was in the running in 2010 for An Education. There’s an Australian element to this film, too, as the lead production company is Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment.

There is, I think, a deliberate nod to one of Robbie’s on-screen personas, Harley Quinn, the mad, bad lover of the Joker. It’s perhaps worth mentioning this at the start to make it clear this is a MA15+ movie with realistic violence that some viewers will find unpleasant to watch.

Indeed, when I attended a media screening I noted the distributor included an advisory note that “this film deals with issues of sexual assault that may be disturbing and difficult for some viewers”.

The film that came to mind, in this sense, as I watched was Yorgos Lanthimos’s intense psychological thriller The Killing of the Sacred Deer (2017), starring Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman and the remarkable Barry Keoghan.

I remember there were complaints about that film, which is drawn from a Euripidean tragedy. People thought they should have been warned what it was about. Not Bambi, that’s for sure. It was one of the best films I saw in 2017.

In this case, the warning is in place. Promising Young Woman opens with 30-year-old Cassie (Mulligan) sprawled on a sofa in a nightclub in an unidentified American city. It could well be Los Angeles, where the film was shot.

A group of men, financial market sorts, look at her and talk about how she’s drunk and “kind of hot”. As her legs part and her panties are visible, one notes that women who behave like this “put themselves in danger”.

There are similarities here with the TV series The Flight Attendent, now on Binge. As it happens its main character, the flight attendant who drinks too much (Kaley Cuoco), is also called Cassie.

Back in what might be an LA nightclub, one of the men goes to Cassie, as his mates cheer him on. But he’s the self-styled “nice guy”. He straightens her up, walks her outside and offers her a lift home. “Sorry about my friends at the bar,” he says. “They’re arseholes.”

Then, en route to her place, he suggests a detour to his flat. There they sit on the lounge and he pours more drinks. He moves in to kiss her. “What are you doing?” she asks repeatedly. “It’s OK, you’re safe,” he tells her.

Suddenly, the dynamic changes completely, and the night does go as the man expected. In a comic touch, at this point we hear It’s Raining Men, performed by DeathbyRomy.

I should point out that there is a lot of humour in the movie. I wouldn’t go as far as to describe it as a black comedy, as it’s too black for that.

It’s more, as the director has noted, about whether the sardonic, self-aware, woman-with-a-plan Cassie will “choose the romantic comedy or the bloodbath”. Ultimately, that’s not an either/or proposition. Soon after that first encounter with a man, we see Cassie with a different man. They’re in his flat. He’s snorting cocaine and she’s passed out. He makes his move anyway. She wakes, says “I need to go home” repeatedly, and again the dynamic changes utterly.

When he insists he’s a nice guy who is interested in her, she asks him to name her job, her age, her hobbies … her name. “Every week a nice guy like you comes over to see if I’m OK,” she tells him. The night does not go as the man ­anticipated.

When we see Cassie back at home — she still lives with her parents, in a suburban home the director admits looks as if it were designed by David Lynch — she is going through a note book full of men’s names. Some she crosses out, some she adds to the list. What, we wonder, is going on here?

Mulligan is astonishing as this razor-sharp woman we do not know. How dangerous is she? Why is she like this? What happened to her? There’s a moment where she walks past three construction workers who wolf whistle at her. What she does in response makes them look down and walk away. I might note here that one of the songs on the excellent soundtrack is F..k Em Up Sis, sung by Renni Rucci.

As we start to learn Cassie’s backstory the movie dramatically expands and goes to a place that is timely and real. If this is a feminist thriller, which it might be, it is one set in the world in which we live.

Cassie was in medical school, top of the class alongside her best friend Nina. This goes to the promising young woman of the title. Each of them dropped out, though, for reasons we will learn, incrementally but powerfully.

Cassie works in a coffee shop. We do not see Nina, but we gradually understand what happened to her and how this changed Cassie’s life. If anything, her life is on hold. When her parents give her a suitcase for her birthday, she knows it’s an “expensive get-out-of-home metaphor”.

When a man from their past walks into the coffee shop, everything changes again.

Gawky but handsome Ryan (Bo Burnham) graduated from the same medical school intake and now works as a paediatric surgeon. He is still in touch with the men, mainly men, that he, Cassie and Nina knew at university.

He tells Cassie he always fancied her and asks her on a date. Cassie agrees and from here the movie goes to some dark places that explore, among other things, the “he said/she said” debate that we see playing out in court cases today. There’s also the “cry wolf” blame game and the “we were just kids” excuses.

“In the old days, we had to go through a girl’s trash,’’ says a lawyer once hired by the university. “Now, one drunk photo at a party, and you can’t believe how hostile that makes a jury.’’

As Cassie becomes closer to Ryan, for reasons that are simple and complex and therefore conflicted, and to the people still at the university there are twists and revelations that lead her to a point of no return.

There are astonishing set-piece scenes between Cassie and that lawyer, Cassie and the female dean, and Cassie and her one-time friend Madison (Alison Brie).

It is towards the end, when Cassie does look a bit like Harley Quinn, that it is difficult to watch because what happens is so possible. This is an intelligent, gripping, important film, from first frame to last.