Promising Young Woman

It’s quite contrived, especially the ending, but the curiosity is pinned at a pretty decent level and the story even manages to pleasantly surprise with the fate of the main characters. Carey Mulligan is good (though I couldn’t shake the feeling that she looks old compared to her peers) and, if we consider how close the premise was to uncontrolled feminist bollocks, everything holds convincingly together and without slipping into the realm of cheap parody. A good #metoo snack that won’t gratuitously piss-off the boys. :) 75% (15/01/2021)

A solid crime thriller starring the brilliant and good-looking Carey Mulligan, who at 36 looks great. The protagonist is traumatized by a tragic event from the past and seeks revenge on all men who abuse women under the influence of alcohol. The concept is great and it's a bit of a shame that the film avoids violence, as in a few scenes it clearly called for it, but it seems to be aimed at academic awards, so maybe that's why. The film flows at a good pace, can be funny in certain scenes, occasionally creates a decent psycho atmosphere, and the ending is definitely unexpected, although not entirely satisfying. A decent film that captivates more with its story, actors, and atmosphere, and if it didn't shy away from brutality, it would be even better. Story****, Action>No, Humor***, Violence>No, Entertainment****, Music***, Visual****, Atmosphere****, Tension***. 7.5/10. (09/01/2021)

It would be tempting to say that it's an uncritical critical success primarily because of the subject matter and the gender behind the script and direction, but that would be unfair to the author. The qualities in this case are due to the way the current #MeToo issue is conceived "with balls" and free of obscene declamations. I don't share the objections to the author's black-and-white "men are pigs" vision when it's the women (Madison, the dean, the ambivalent anti-heroine Cassie herself) who contribute to the overall effect/impact of "rape culture" here, after all, that's what the two acts of the revenge plan are all about. What's more, even if it did, it rides such a surgically precise black-humor wave about an achingly serious subject with a clever, deliberately overblown 80s pop neon styling that it's impossible not to fall for. Carey, then, is as engrossing as she is disturbing with her complex "PTSD performance" in the whirlwind of a self-destructive spiral of vendetta, and so perhaps only the line with Ryan grates a little too much, because it's too obvious from the start why she's there and where she's going with it. The weakest link is of course the hotly debated ending. Not the ending itself – that one is perfect –, but rather the epilogue. On the face of it, it's delivered in a way that brings satisfaction, but the further away from the screening, the more obvious it becomes that it's redundant and takes the whole thing a bit too far. It could and should have ended already in a surgery or a non-literal postal package. (14/02/2021)

If you've known the term "rape culture" for more than a year, you're not looking at the film through the spectacles of this fundamental issue, and thus you can see in all its nakedness how horribly written and filmed the whole thing is. Nowhere in the world do people talk to each other like this, the dialogue sounds like internet discussions read out loud or situations condensed from different articles. It's filmed like a sitcom, it's static (and often with insignificant poser symbolism), and in the faster sequences it's so badly edited that you can't tell exactly what happened. The film even has a reasonable musical structure, yet has no tempo, which I never would even have thought was technically achievable. And I've only seen a romance handled this poorly maybe in the film Obvious Child. Unfortunately, Promising Young Woman is exactly that case where a theme pushed from below gets into the hands of the middle class. It becomes a dull and silly hurrah farce that enjoys its untouchability and success under the wing of its subject. The whole issue of rape culture is thus relegated to a dumbed-down platitude, the trademark strong woman, and by continuing to be represented by similarly bad and calculated films it will retrospectively do a disservice to the whole fight against patriarchal society. Hashtag cinema at its worst. (01/06/2021)

I watched Promising Young Woman without watching the trailer or doing any further research about the film, and I was definitely surprised by the final product. The plot, involving a a crime for which the statute of limitations has expired, is nothing we haven't seen elsewhere before, and you figure out pretty soon what actually happened back then. But the film's engaging element is the ambiguous character of Cassie and her (slightly) sociopathic cat-and-mouse game, which has a justifiable reason. While there is a perceptible wink to the #metoo campaign, I found it non-violent and unobtrusive in its execution. So for just under two hours, to the soundtrack of (at times playfully adapted) familiar hits, I was swept along on a journey of revenge, the conclusion of which annoyed me to some extent but ultimately satisfied me. P.S. In the end I was reminded of The Life of David Gale. (18/04/2021)