Promising Young Woman

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)

A rough patch on a rough bag. If it weren't for the (complete) ending, I would probably be a little happier, but even so, Promising Young Woman surprised me a lot with how thoughtfully, stylishly and often mischievously amusingly Emerald Fennell managed to grasp a topic with which she could just as well have had struggles. Carey Mulligan is perfect (one wouldn't even know she's the same actress as in The Dig) and I was pleased with Alison Brie in her small role. (04/06/2021)

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)

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)

Promising Young Woman is a revenge-flick product of the #metoo mindset in a pop package with a pleasing cast and more thorough characterisation of the protagonist than we are used to from thematically similar revenge-horror movies. Carey Mulligan is cute, but the mentions of “Oscar-worthy” acting are off base. Besides that, the film in no way goes beyond the creative boundaries of playful fluff, which is original only in its placement of the given theme in the A-list mainstreem. Conversely, the would-be screenwriting magic in the climax serves as confirmation of the film’s creative limits within the confines of a mere fresh teen drama. Plying the same waters, Assassination Nation was bolder and more stylish. (27/01/2021)