I first saw Emerald Fennell’s attention-grabbing thriller over a year ago, and Promising Young Woman was originally intended for release here last spring.
Some critics suggested that delay meant the film had missed its moment, as #MeToo activism was sidelined (along with much else) by Covid. As if misogyny or sexual violence are ever likely to go out of fashion.
Winner of two BAFTAs and nominated for five Oscars, Promising Young Woman arrives in this jurisdiction festooned in garlands, but also bearing some controversy.
There was that bizarre Variety review which seemed to suggest that Carey Mulligan was not attractive enough to play the role of a woman who seduced predatory men to take revenge. A furore ensued, and rightly, but others have criticised Promising Young Woman for being too angry, too flippant, too confrontational, too resolutely anti-male.
Over the course of a wildly entertaining 113 minutes it manages to hit all those notes, and deliberately so. For Fennell’s film is not in the business of fence-mending: it’s more intent on telling it like it is.
The genre into which the film most neatly fits is the rape-revenge saga, but with significant differences.
Firstly, it has a sense of humour, which instead of undermining its seriousness, somehow enhances it; secondly, while most rape-revenge protagonists are righteous males avenging wronged sisters or spouses, the angel of fury here is a woman, with purer motives; lastly, and crucially, while many of these revenge sagas exploitatively dwell on scenes of rape, Promising Young Woman doesn’t dramatise the incident at all.
Mulligan is Cassie Thomas, a former medical student who seems to have lost all interest in personal advancement: at 30-odd, she works in a coffee shop and lives at home with her parents.
She appears to have hit the sauce too, because when we first meet her she’s dead drunk in a bar and apparently close to passing out when a well-spoken man (Adam Brody) offers to see her safely home. He identifies himself as “a nice guy”, but is anything but: once inside Cassie’s flat he attempts to take advantage of her state. At which point she steadies up and eyes him coldly — she isn’t drunk at all.
Quest: Cassie pretends to be drunk to trap men who want to take advantage of incapacitated women
Nothing particularly bad happens to the string of men she encounters in this way: Cassie’s mission seems to be educational, a demonstration of the many shades and nuances of male predatory behaviour.
She’s on this quest because of her friend, Nina, who was raped at a college party and later took her own life. The film’s plot proper kicks off when Cassie finds out that the man who raped Nina, Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), has returned to the US after a stint in London.
She then resolves to take revenge on not just Al, but everyone else who failed Nina and tried to brush her assault under the carpet: lawyers, the college dean, sceptical female friends.
How far will she go, and is she prepared to jeopardise her new relationship with a man (Bo Burnham) who really does seem like a ‘nice guy’?
Promising Young Woman’s rather bleak view of the male gender ought to be seen in context. Legal systems the world over continue to make it next to impossible for a woman to get justice regarding rape; everyday acts of sexism remain commonplace, and females are still depicted by the law and certain sections of the media as somehow complicit in sexual attacks.
Did you know there’s a word for anti-male prejudice? Neither did I: it’s ‘misandry’, but doesn’t get many airings.
Reasons, then, to be angry, and Promising Young Woman’s ire is all the more pointed because it’s often cloaked in humour. When one of her prowling targets calls her “insane”, Cassie laughs and says “you know what, I honestly don’t think I am”.
Mulligan is exceptional in a demanding and nuanced role that could so easily have descended into caricature. She’s too good an actress for that, and in Cassie creates a feminist terrorist, a slightly unhinged martyr to the cause.
Promising Young Woman is a genre picture, deliberately made to carry its message to the widest possible audience. And that message is not cheerful: after decades, centuries and millennia of entitlement, the male mind is either incapable of correctly understanding the simple concept of consent, or not disposed to acknowledge it.
Even the ‘nice guys’ find their moral compasses skewed by the scent of sexual power, and know deep down that if they do act on dark impulses, they live in a system rigged to protect them.
And behind all the jokes, and the simplistic revenge schema in Fennell’s often brilliant debut feature, lurks a mood close to despair.
Darius Marder’s startlingly original drama is an object lesson in how much we take for granted. Riz Ahmed is Ruben, drummer in a death metal duo with his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke).
They tour middle America constantly, and live together in a customised RV. They seem deeply in love, but there are problems: both are recovering addicts, and at one point the camera hints that Lou self-harms.
The morning after a concert, Ruben begins to notice that he can’t hear properly, and when he goes to a doctor, is told that he’s lost almost 80pc of his hearing. Being a man, Ruben goes into denial, plays one more ear-splitting concert and ends up completely deaf.
Dealing with affliction: Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal
With Lou’s help, he finds a sanctuary run by Joe (Paul Raci), a charismatic Vietnam veteran. He manages his refuge on ideological lines: “We believe that being deaf is not a handicap,” he explains to Ruben, “it’s not something to fix.”
At this rural retreat, Ruben will be taught sign language, and some much-needed humility, as he comes to terms with his changed circumstance. His fury is understandable, and Ruben’s emotional journey feels like the seven stages of grief.
He rediscovers his equilibrium at the centre, but does not see a future for himself there, and has all along been planning to raise the $40,000 he needs for a cochlear implant. This costly operation will restore limited hearing, but Ruben will be disappointed with the results as he sets out for Belgium, where Lou is now living with her father, for a troubled reunion.
Ahmed is astonishingly good as Ruben, a pig-headed young man who insisted on dealing with his affliction in his own way. The film’s title refers not to the music he and Lou bash out mercilessly at the start of the film, but to the jarring feedback Ruben must endure after his ear operation. And in the end, you feel, he may decide that silence is preferable.
Ahmed aside, the film’s sound production is the real star. Once Ruben’s hearing fails, we drift in and out of the muffled nether world he now inhabits, and are startled when the rich soundscapes he’s missing — birds singing, trees rustling — briefly chime in.
After his fall, he must literally reassemble himself, and accept that the life he had before is gone. Doing so will not be easy.
