Don’t let the pastel colour palette and upbeat soundtrack of nostalgic pop remixes fool you. Promising Young Woman is a captivatingly terrifying thriller masked as a flirty chick flick. The blurring of genres has proven to be triggering for some audience members as the movie deals with sexual assault and violence, often with a comedic tone. Please be warned that the movie does have graphic scenes of sexual assault and should be watched at your own discretion.
Emerald Fennell— from the latest season of Netflix’s The Crown—makes her directorial debut with this colourful revenge story.
The movie follows Cassie—played phenomenally well by actress Carrie Mulligan—a former medical school student who spends her evenings frequenting local bars and clubs.
While the trailer teases us with the possibility of a gory string of revenge murders, in the movie we see Cassie using her feminine appeal to teach men about the dangers of date-rape and expose them as the not-so ‘nice guys’ they think they are. This approach, however, wavers on the line of being empowering or triggering for those who have experienced sexual assault.
“If she’s too drunk to say yes, then the answer is no,” should be the official tagline of this movie, as its main job is clarifying this all-too-important, yet easily forgotten, lesson of consent.
What makes this movie so tantalizingly creepy is that it puts an end to the ‘nice guy’ trope we have all grown accustomed to seeing in every rom-com made in the past 20 years—and it manages to do so in a darkly funny way.
No more ‘bad boy reformed’ or ‘innocent guy next door.’ Promising Young Woman makes it clear that you can’t be so quick to trust someone because it is often the ‘nice guys’ who turn out to be the worst. It manages to communicate this by highlighting the absurdity of what these guys seem to be able to get away with and how they justify their actions.
This is made clear right from the skin-crawling opening scene between Cassie and the ‘nice guy’ from the bar who offers her a ride home, only to make a quick pit stop at his apartment first.
Throughout these profoundly uncomfortable scenes, we are treated to a brilliant soundtrack, including several pop remixes of songs such as “It’s Raining Men” and Britney Spears’ “Toxic.”
The soundtrack, along with aesthetically pleasing shots full of pastels and florals, gives this movie the sugarcoated sweetness that starkly contrasts with its profoundly dark characters and overall message. These production elements are strikingly I, Tonya-esque, and reminiscent of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette—adding Promising Young Woman to the list of female-led, eye-catching films that do an incredible job of blending the dark and the light.
The nail-biting, stomach-wrenching climax is something I’ll have to let you experience for yourself. However, you may not walk away 100 per cent satisfied with the way ‘justice’ has been carried out. In fact, the end of this movie leaves us with the chilling question, “Where do we go from here?”—not only for the characters in the movie but for the entire genre of film.
Have we all become too complacent to the themes of manipulation and sexual assault that appear all too often in movies of this genre? How do we change the industry to better reflect healthy relationships? Lastly, are rape-revenge movies such as this empowering victims of sexual assault and providing them with a fresh voice in the industry, or are they simply doing more damage to those who have lived through trauma?
These thoughts have puzzled me since I watched this movie and have sparked an online conversation on the portrayal of date-rape in films. I can’t seem to come up with concrete answers to any of the aforementioned questions which leads me to believe that this may be one of those movies that divides us; you either love it or you hate it. Perhaps, if you’re like me, you loved certain production elements of it. More than that, maybe you also enjoyed the overall potential that Promising Young Woman has to initiate a new genre in the revenge/thriller category.
