Promising Young Woman Is a Thrilling and Thoughtful Dissection of Rape Culture

Promising Young Woman is being marketed as a revenge thriller, a category replete with dark themes, ominous music, and wronged women. But Emerald Fennell’s feature directorial debut does much more than soak the genre standards in a candy-coated aesthetic—it gnaws at the core of the genre itself. The story she spins is even darker than it initially appears while also being irresistibly entertaining.

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman. Focus Features

We first meet Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) in the middle of her weekly ritual, which she spells out early in the movie (and in the trailer): “Every week I go to a club. I act like I’m too drunk to stand. And every week a nice guy comes over to see if I’m okay.” These “nice guys” all find ways to maneuver the seemingly barely coherent Cassandra back to their places, shushing her confused questions and concerns. Once they’re on the verge of assaulting her, however, the pretense drops, and the “nice guy” in question—who with chilling frequency seems not to consider what he’s doing to be assault—turns out to have more on his hands than he bargained for.

After the opening we return to Cassandra’s life as a medical school drop-out who works at a coffee shop where her boss, Gail (Laverne Cox), seems to be her only friend. She lives with her parents (Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown), who are concerned about her lack of forward momentum and inability to get over the years-ago loss of her friend Nina. Nina is clearly the motivation for Cassandra’s revenge ritual, but we don’t know much more about why until a former classmate walks in the coffee-shop door. Ryan (Bo Burnham), a former med school classmate who professes to have had a crush on Cassandra and immediately asks her out, inadvertently sends her down a more targeted revenge path, through which we learn more about Nina, more about why Cassandra dropped out of school, and more about the pervasive toxicity of rape culture.

Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman. Merie Weismiller Wallace/Focus Features

Promising Young Woman’s narrative has a current-like pull to it, pairing the intensity of an edgy thriller with an elegiac biopsy of a world that normalizes sexual assault. Cassandra’s mission is less a desire for destruction than an attempt to somehow heal not just herself but society by forcing her targets to face their role in rape culture. The effort is akin to rolling a boulder up a hill, and Mulligan’s captivating performance keeps us deeply invested in her, even—and perhaps especially—when the boulder seems on the verge of crushing her. The weight and subtlety of the storytelling complicates the clean crime/punishment dynamic revenge thrillers often idealize.

Adding a candy-colored sheen to a grim story isn’t a brand-new concept, but the aesthetic Fennell and the production team create does feel novel in its effect. In other movies it’s frequently used to highlight the twisted or the grotesque in the narrative, or heighten the sense of unreality. Here, it makes the story feel even more real. The bright prints and pastel colors Cassandra dresses in and is surrounded by feel like a grounded part of herself and her world, an anchor away from the dozens of performances she’s putting on. Music is also used superbly, with everything from cotton-candy pop songs to noir-like strings (and sometimes a combination of the two) keeping us closely in tune with the storytelling.

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Carey Mulligan is spectacular, magnetically drawing the viewer into the depth of her sorrow and the breadth of her anger, as well as her affection, compassion, and sense of humor. Mulligan has often worked within the restraint and subtlety demanded of period dramas, which makes it particularly invigorating to see her as the lead of a thriller in which the feeling of the wheels being off is half the fun. It’s a testament to her skill as an actor how effectively she emanates that energetic current without losing an ounce of the restraint and subtlety that this kind of role ultimately requires.

Fennell and her casting team must have some serious pull—and the great script (also written by Fennell) surely also helped. The cast is stacked, with a number of one- or two-scene characters played by big-name actors like Alison Brie, Connie Britton, and Molly Shannon. Jennifer Coolidge is particularly compelling as Cassandra’s mother; her moving portrayal of a worried parent is more subdued than the expertly executed broad comedy she’s known for, but even her few comedic lines are scene stealers.

Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge as Cassandra’s parents. Focus Features

As a comedian, Bo Burnham is known for his disarming introspection, which often features a craving for authenticity and an acknowledgement of its limits in performance. Like several of the other men in the movie, his public persona and history feel cleverly weaponized as he plays someone both Cassandra and the audience desperately want to give their trust while knowing that he could very well prove not to be worthy of it. It’s undoubtedly no coincidence that several of the men in the movie played “nice guy” characters in mid-2000s teen shows: Adam Brody in Gilmore Girls and The OC and Max Greenfield and Christopher Lowell in Veronica Mars. The movie wants us to want to give these men the benefit of the doubt before it shows its hand and reveals whether they deserve it.

Stop here if you’d prefer the ending not to be spoiled, though I hope you come back after watching the movie, because I promise you’ll want to talk about the movie’s ending.

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The culmination of Cassandra’s odyssey through the people she holds responsible for Nina’s death ultimately brings her to the bachelor party of Al Monroe (Lowell), the man who assaulted Nina at a party in front of a lot of people, including Ryan. Though the movie never explicitly says how Nina died, the implication is that she died by suicide following the assault and the general lack of support in its aftermath. Cassandra has confronted the friend who didn’t believe Nina, the dean of students who didn’t hold the perpetrator responsible, and the defense attorney who launched a smear campaign against her in order to win the case, and while none of these encounters have brought her a sense of peace, none of the actual details have gone awry.

This time, her plan—to carve Nina’s name into Al’s chest so that he’s marked by her the same way she’d felt marked by him—goes horrifically wrong. Al breaks free of one of the restraints she’s used and, after a brief struggle, smothers her to death with a pillow. The scene is nauseatingly long, making it clear that Al has crossed from “self-defense” to actively wanting to kill her and that there will be no last-minute triumphant revival for Cassandra. In the morning, Al’s friend and fellow former classmate Joe (Greenfield) helps him burn Cassandra’s body, assuring Al vociferously that “it’s not your fault.”

Christopher Lowell as Al. Merie Weismiller Wallace/Focus Features

It’s a gutting conclusion—one that even further complicates the revenge drama narrative and clarifies a troubling element from earlier in the movie. During the first two acts, I was bothered by the sense that Nina, the movie’s original victim, was decentered in the narrative; as is often the case in revenge movies, the focus is on the avenger rather than the avenged. It’s assumed that the victim, dead or alive, wants the same things as the protagonist. The realization that what we’ve been watching all along was actually an account of Cassandra’s final weeks shifts our perspective on the whole story, putting us in the position Cassandra’s been in for seven years: mourning and sickened by the injustice of her death.

Like Michaela Coel’s 2020 HBO show I May Destroy You, Promising Young Woman resists depicting a victorious triumph over rape culture. However, while I May Destroy You earnestly seeks out meaningful ways to individually heal while living in a broken society, Promising Young Woman’s ultimate takeaway is much bleaker. Here, there are no survivors of rape culture—it either takes you out or it takes your soul. The closest Cassandra comes to “triumph” is at Al’s wedding, when we learn that before embarking on her final mission, she laid a series of failsafes to incriminate Al if she didn’t come back alive. Police sirens roll into the wedding, and a series of cheeky scheduled texts appear on Ryan’s phone as Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” soars over the scene. She “gets” them, but at the expense of her own life.

Promising Young Woman doesn’t just turn the revenge thriller inside out or on its head, it spins it around and sends it through a fun-house mirror. Fennell resists either valorizing or pitying Cassandra—or her audience—and similarly resists neat answers to the questions she raises about the pursuit of punishment and closure in sexual assault narratives. Her stellar debut and the performances it contains will certainly inspire discussion and devotion for years to come.

The National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-656-4673.