“It all began with a scene in my head of a drunk woman being undressed by a guy she picked up and suddenly she was stone cold sober,” said Emerald. This is how our protagonist Cassie (Carey Mulligan) exacts her revenge, by pretending to be the prey when she’s in fact the predator.
When the screenplay for Promising Young Woman landed on producer Margot Robbie’s desk at her Lucky Chap shingle, she knew that Emerald Fennell’s talents extended far beyond her writing on the quirky Killing Eve and acting the part of Camilla Bowles on The Crown. Written during the peak of #MeToo hashtags era, Fennell knew she wasn’t inclined to write a straight-up finger-pointing drama about boys being bad and girls being available after a few drinks. But it does explicitly target the cancer of raped women not being heard and cursory investigation quickly being quashed to preserve the reputations of the perpetrators. This is the sting in the film’s tail.
Curiously, Promising Young Woman isn’t a drama at all. It is a dark comedy starring a psycho bitch seeking revenge for her friend’s death. It’s about unhealed trauma. It turns high drama into the sometimes absurd.
Cassie is by no means a super-hero. Nor is she a victim. She’s a deeply-flawed hero at best. She may even be a villain at times. This muddied morality only adds to her intrigue.
Pushing thirty, Cassie’s unable to move on in her life after dropping out of medical school and barely eking out a living working at a café when she’s clearly capable of so much more. Living with the burden of your college friend Nina committing suicide due to a sexual assault by classmate Al Monroe (Chris Lowell) will do that to you. The investigation was dropped because nobody likes a mess and Al was such a “promising young man.” He’s also getting married, so there’s that.
This only provides a context and motivation for Cassie’s actions. Ostensibly, she’s seeking revenge, but it’s clear that her sadistic streak is hitched to something more sinister inside her. Fennell is acutely aware of this. Cassie is not merely a harbinger of justice.
“I needed Cassie to be grounded and contained in her bad decisions. I wanted a main character we’d find difficult to get behind,” continued the writer/director.
Emerald Fennell took special care in building Cassie. “First of all, Cassie isn’t a character. She’s a real woman.” Actually she’s a compendium of experiences of countless women, including Fennell. Cassie is not pitiable, she’s not feckless, and she doesn’t rise from the ashes and take over the world and build a social movement. She’s a traumatized women trying to punish those that did her friend wrong.
“I didn’t want Cassie to be ’empowered’ because it’s almost become an oppressive and reductive term,” explained Fennell. She didn’t want Promising Young Woman to be stuck in a pile of all the earnest “cause” films. There is no checkbox to be checked here, only revenge to be meted out.
Despite Emerald’s efforts, Cassie can’t hide behind her benign female badassery forever. “She uses her blondness, body, and femininity as a weapon.” They are the only tools at her disposal. Don’t be fooled by Cassie’s candy-colored wigs or the bright carnival colors of her non-alcoholic beverages. She has a dark streak that cuts deeply through the thematic bone. She wants results, not just a shakedown.
Fennell doesn’t bother with the thematic pleasantries of “boys will be boys” or “it happened so long ago.” Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Nor is this film about men versus women. When Cassie broaches Nina’s death with Dean Elizabeth Walker (Connie Britton) from the medical school, she is as dismissive as she is uncomfortable. She says, “I know you feel bad that you weren’t there, but you gotta let it go. Don’t be a child because you can’t fix it, Cassie.”
Cassie even has an encounter with “the go to lawyer to shame women into dropping rape charges,” Jordan Green (Alfred Molina) to show the stuff she’s made of. Although he sees the error of his ways, Nina’s still dead.
Emerald Fennell was meticulous in not portraying the men in Promising Young Woman as a deviant sexual predators or rapists. “The men weren’t entering the story as creeps, but as opportunists. They believe they’re in a romcom and have found that magical connection. So long as the girls are pretty and laugh at their jokes, it must be true love.” The men genuinely wanted to help out a damsel in distress. Fennell deliberately used male comedians to play these characters straight to make her not so subtle point.
Cassie isn’t entirely noble in her pursuits either. Consider the opening scenes when she meets nice guy Jerry (Adam Brody). Here’s a drunk girl who needs a knight in shining armor. He takes her home to further discuss their “deep connection.” Cassie terrorizes him with questions like, “Where did I grow up? Where did I go to school? What’s my name?… Too hard?” Then he backs off when he realizes she’s sobered up in a matter of minutes.
Cassie’s a mess. She can’t even hold down a relationship with poor Ryan (Bo Burnham). All he wants to do is be nice to her, but she has her own baggage to contend with. Her revenge mission seems to bifurcate.
Is Cassie on a mission on how men should treat women or did she just turn man-hating nasty? Or is she reciting from her “Men Are Basic. Women Are Victims” handbook? Is there a plan or is she off the rails? “We all like both male and female characters doing horrible things,” she explained cheekily.
“We had to push and pull at the audience’s allegiances.” The story had to shift audience’s sympathies to keep them engaged. And when they’re engaged, they’re thinking. And when they’re thinking, they realize actions have consequences.
Fennell wasn’t going to pigeonhole her script into the familiar revenge tropes of gaslighting men playing the victim with corny “I thought you wanted it too, babe” lines. But she didn’t make them the sole perpetrators either. That’s how Fennell made her point and got the conversation about boundaries started. Discussion shines a bright light on the issue.
Promising Young Woman isn’t a turgid, woke tale of male dominance collapsing under the weight of its own self-worth. But it does highlight how a potentially fulfilling life can be cut short.
By the end of the Promising Young Woman, Cassie isn’t showing much promise either. Fennell makes some final points about the relentless pursuit of revenge. “Revenge is futile, empty, hopeless, and bleak.” Nina will never come back.