Promising Young Woman
Emerald Fennell (2020)
Its combination of serious themes, stylised look and sarcastic humour was bound to make Emerald Fennell’s feature debut divisive. Some viewers will see a rape revenge story as, by definition, a substantial undertaking. Others will think it’s, incontestably, no laughing matter and therefore ineligible for black comedy treatment. It’s instructive to compare the reactions of, for example, Stephanie Zacharek to Promising Young Woman and The Assistant (2019). Zacharek is respectful of Kitty Green’s po-faced account of sexual abuse in the workplace. Her negative review of Fennell’s film earnestly concludes that ‘Women are angry for good reason. They also deserve better movies than this one’. Zacharek censures the picture as ‘lip-gloss misanthropy packaged as feminist manifesto’ but transposing those two phrases gives a better idea of what writer-director Fennell seems, to me, to be aiming for. Pauline Kael famously disparaged Interiors, Woody Allen’s first foray into straight drama, as ‘deep on the surface’. Emerald Fennell attempts the opposite. She means to create the semblance of sensational shallowness as a portal to depth.
Set in present-day Ohio, Promising Young Woman begins in a busy, noisy bar where a posse of businessmen moans about a female colleague’s complaints of unfair treatment at work. The suits catch sight of another suit, alone on a banquette across the bar. It’s worn by a good-looking woman whose attitude contradicts her sharp outfit: she sprawls on the banquette, too drunk to notice that her black skirt is halfway up her thighs. When the men start laughing about what they’d like to do with her, one of their number makes a chivalrous intervention. He approaches the woman and offers to get her safely home. She mumbles acceptance and they take a cab. On the way, he wonders if she might like to come back to his place first for a night cap; again, she more or less says yes and the cab stops outside his apartment. He gets her a drink – not a small one – and they move to the bedroom. When he starts caressing her and removes her knickers, she mutters, ‘What are you doing?’, though she still sounds out of it. A few seconds later, when she repeats the question, her voice and bearing are transformed. ‘I said: what are you doing?’ she demands, stone cold sober. Fennell cuts to a shot of the woman walking in a street early next morning. Holding her shoes in one hand and, in the other, fast food that she wolfs down, she looks a wreck: a few workmen jeer at her. A gorgon stare in their direction shuts them up.
This woman is Cassandra (Cassie) Thomas (Carey Mulligan), the film’s title character though perhaps not its only one. The other candidate, never seen, is Nina Fisher, Cassie’s best friend from childhood and fellow student at medical school until an incident there changed both their lives. Nina, while intoxicated, was raped by another student, the well-liked Al Monroe. Her representations ignored by the medical school authorities, Nina withdrew from her studies and subsequently took her own life. Cassie also dropped out. Now approaching her thirtieth birthday, she still lives at home with her parents. By day, she’s a coffee shop barista. By night, she goes to bars, plays drunk, gets herself picked up by men and, as they’re about to exploit the situation, delivers the twist of her sobriety. In a notebook Cassie keeps score of what it seems fair to call her conquests. It’s a considerable total.
In the course of the film, Cassie wears various outfits and wigs but always the same nail varnish, a different colour on each finger – pink, turquoise, yellow, mint-green, scarlet. The coffee shop where she’s worked for the last three years is done out in bubblegum pink; Cassie stands at the counter framed by an array of girly-coloured cupcakes. The fluffy ambience is sharply contradicted by the shop’s owner, Gail (Laverne Cox), who’s a mixture of caustic and concerned for Cassie. (‘This is a summer job for a stoned teenager,’ Gail tells her, ‘You’re stinking up the place with your sad little face’.) The shop doesn’t look to have many customers but one of them triggers the central events of Promising Young Woman. Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham), another of Cassie’s medical school contemporaries and now a hospital paediatrician, immediately recognises her. A halting, edgy conversation follows but Ryan doesn’t give up on Cassie. When she subsequently agrees to go out with him, he mentions what other students in their year are now up to. A girl called Madison McPhee has abandoned a medical career to be a homemaker and has just had twins. Al Monroe is getting married soon. Once she knows this, Cassie continues with her regular night life but she finds the time during the day to expand – and focus – her avenger activities.
She meets Madison (Alison Brie) for lunch and keeps refilling her glass, having hired a man to then take the drunken woman to a hotel room. With no memory of what happened there, Madison leaves a series of distraught voicemails to which Cassie doesn’t reply. Under the pretence of wanting to resume her studies, she arranges an interview with Elizabeth Walker (Connie Britton), the medical school dean who dismissed Nina’s allegations. Cassie, immediately beforehand, has lured Walker’s teenage daughter, Amber (Francisca Estevez), into her car by posing as a make-up artist for Amber’s favourite boy band. In the interview, when she broaches the subject of Nina and Dean Walker defends her inaction on the grounds of ‘lack of evidence’, Cassie tells her that Amber is now, with a group of male students, in the same dorm room where Nina was raped. The news sends Walker into meltdown, eliciting from her a tearful apology for not taking Nina’s case seriously as she begs to know the number of the room. Mission seemingly accomplished, Cassie reveals that she’s actually dropped Amber off at a diner: the girl is waiting in vain for the boy band members that Cassie told her would be turning up there.
These encounters illustrate either flagrantly casual plotting or the extent of the protagonist’s cynicism (and perhaps both). If Cassie hired a man to teach Madison a lesson before meeting her, she had to be sure that Madison would still take the view, as she duly does, that Nina was asking for what happened to her. Turning up outside Amber’s high school to trick her before seeing her mother, Cassie must have known that Elizabeth Walker would stand by the decision she made ten years ago (it’s more likely, of course, that Walker, when Cassie raises the matter, would decline to discuss it at all and promptly draw the interview to a close). It’s possible that a contrite change of heart on the part of Madison or the dean is irrelevant to Cassie – that she prearranges punishment for them both regardless – but that’s not borne out by her later visit to the home of Jordan Green (Alfred Molina), Al Monroe’s lawyer. Green harassed Nina into abandoning attempts to bring the case to court. Thanks to a nervous breakdown, he’s now on indefinite sabbatical from law practice and Cassie finds him in a sorry, supplicant state. As she leaves his home, she tells the hitman waiting outside not to bother. Her next port of call is Nina’s mother (Molly Shannon), who, though still grieving the loss of her daughter, tells Cassie it’s time to move on (though it’s not clear what the mother means when she tells Cassie, ‘You’ve got to stop doing this’).
Cassie moves on by falling in love with gauchely attractive, drolly self-deprecating Ryan, who is drawn to her from the moment he first sees her behind the counter and asks incredulously what she’s doing ‘working here‘. When she raises her eyebrows he instantly apologises and says he didn’t mean … She helps him: ‘You didn’t mean what’s a promising young woman like me doing working at a shitty coffee shop?’ He jokes about making an exit, coming back in and trying again. She asks if he wants milk in his coffee. He jokes on: ‘No, but you can spit in it if you want to – I’d completely understand’. Cassie gives him a straight look and obliges. Undaunted, Ryan nervously asks her on a date, which startles even Cassie – ‘Seriously? I just spat in your coffee …’ Which he then drinks from. Unlike those we see picking her up when she’s fake-drunk, Ryan doesn’t profess so much as seem to embody nice-guyness. It’s one of the strengths of Promising Young Woman that, thanks to Bo Burnham’s skill and charm, we, like Cassie, start to believe that Ryan is a thoroughly decent chap – even as we suspect, and as Cassie knows, that will prove to be a contradiction in terms.
When panic-stricken Madison turns up at her house, Cassie reassures her nothing happened in the hotel room, that her male companion simply put her in bed there and ensured she was in the recovery position’. After her lunch with Cassie, Madison says, she remembered something. There was a ‘stupid video’ of the assault on Nina, which got sent round the students. Madison still has the recording (she’s kept all her old phones – ‘for photos or whatever’) and says she’s ashamed that she ‘thought it was funny’. She gives Cassie the phone, advising her against watching the video before telling her to ‘never fucking contact me again’. Cassie, of course, do watch the video. It’s doubly devastating viewing, because of Nina’s ordeal and because the male onlookers to the attack include Ryan. Cassie ends their relationship and, threatening to expose him by making the video public, pressures him into telling her where Al Monroe’s stag party will take place. Ryan complies, setting up the climax of Cassie’s campaign and of the film.
Fennell uses a soundtrack of pop songs that I didn’t know (except for ‘It’s Raining Men’, ‘2 Become 1’ and ‘Angel of the Morning’), as well as a few bits of classical music (including Tristan and Isolde). She references, according to a New Yorker piece by Carmen Maria Machado, rape-revenge movies which I haven’t seen (save for Thelma & Louise). She casts – as sexually predatory or abusive men who are soi-disant -declared good guys – actors who in previous screen comedies have played characters meant to be likeable and/or innocuous, even despite their sexual shenanigans. These include Adam Brody, as the knight in tarnished armour in the film’s opening episode, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse from Greg Mottola’s Superbad (2007). That movie also is terra incognita to this viewer. All in all, I’m glad I read up a bit on Promising Young Woman before seeing it (especially glad that I read Hannah McGill’s perceptive, admirably balanced piece in Sight & Sound (May 2021)).
Even without knowing Fennell’s tactics in advance, though, it would be hard to ignore the queasy import of some of her song choices, including the first number heard – a remix of Charlie XCX’s ‘Boys’. Perhaps its words and bouncy rhythm are ironic but ‘Boys’ sounds like an expression of greedy pleasure-seeking. Fennell herself appears in a cameo, on Cassie’s laptop screen, as a make-up vlogger:
‘You always want your liner to be darker than your gloss. … Now add the gloss. I like to use the cheaper glosses and save the money for my highlighter and base… And voila! The perfect blowjob lips!’
Cassie follows the instructions. After applying liner and gloss, she looks in a mirror and, with her thumb, smudges the bright pink lipstick round her mouth so that it resembles a wound. Promising Young Woman makes furiously clear that sexual exploitation of women is no joke but the casting evokes a very recent cultural context in which men behaving badly were treated light-heartedly. Fennell, while vigorously deriding the pretext that Nina was playing with fire, does seem to acknowledge, through her soundtrack and her own contribution on camera, that aggressive male sexual entitlement can articulate with, and be accommodated by, heedless appetite on the part of its victims-to-be.
Promising Young Woman won this year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The other nominations were Judas and the Black Messiah, Sound of Metal, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Minari. Much as I like the last-named film, it doesn’t have a great script – if I’d had a vote, it would have been cast for Emerald Fennell: she has written a gripping, challenging story with plenty of sharp dialogue. (The witty but wary sparring between Cassie and Ryan does an excellent job of setting up, and sustaining, an untrusting mood). Yet there are glaring gaps in the screenplay. Where does Cassie – on barista wages and whose parents (Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown), in their immaculate but kitschy home, don’t suggest affluence – get the funds to hire people to deal with Madison and Jordan Green? Although digital technology plays an important part in the plot, Fennell is highly selective about Cassie’s access to it. Her persisting obsession with what happened to her friend is the very heart of the film yet Cassie hasn’t bothered to keep online tabs on Al Monroe, and his social media presence, in the intervening years. Madison’s retaining – and suddenly ‘remembering’ the rape video – is implausible. And if the video was freely circulating among students at the time, it’s striking that neither Cassie nor (presumably) Nina had any idea of its existence.
Fennell doesn’t rely at all on flashback. When the video comes to light, we watch a stricken Cassie watching it (too quickly – the rhythm of this sequence is wrong) but we’re spared the experience ourselves. In this instance, the discreet direction is welcome; in another, important respect, opacity is unhelpful. Once Cassie has revealed to would-be rapists that she isn’t drunk at all, what else does she do to them? In her Time review, Stephanie Zacharek notes that – after that opening encounter, as Cassie makes her way home – ‘her limbs are streaked with blood … Something happened in that bedroom all right, but you know she’s the one who scored’. Zacharek may have misread the red stuff – according to the version of the screenplay available online[1]:
‘A spatter of what looks like blood hits the paving stones. As we pull out we reveal CASSANDRA, in last night’s clothes, high heels in one hand, “blood” running down one elbow. It is only when we see her fully we see she is eating a breakfast hotdog.’
But the screenplay then continues: ‘She looks completely remorseless, calm and, honestly, pretty cool. Whatever the hell she’s done, it’s made her feel great’. Cassie’s only assignment shown through to her exit from it is with pretentious wimp Neil (Mintz-Plasse) – a self-styled budding novelist as well as nice guy – who soon seems physically intimidated by her. Cassie uses words to humiliate Neil; she doesn’t need to lay a finger on him. But is that always the case? Adam Brody’s character Jerry is described in the online screenplay (where he’s called ‘Jez’) as ‘a shy, sweet guy who is clearly dying to leave’ his boorish work colleagues in the opening scene. Are the mild-mannered Jerry and Neil typical of Cassie’s predator-prey? Since she doesn’t pre-handpick her would-be one-night-stands, are we meant think she can intuitively recognise not just a wolf in sheep’s clothing but a man who’ll continue to insist he’s a pussycat? Leaving unexplained the extent of the heroine’s revenge on guys who pick her up is more than puzzling. It ignores the issue of what happens if – or, surely, when – they get angry that she isn’t blind drunk, and retaliate violently. This is an astonishing omission in a piece premised on male sexual brutality.
The omission is corrected, and visual discretion abandoned, during the film’s horribly compelling final act. Fennell and her cinematographer, Benjamin Kračun, impart a sense of impending doom to Cassie’s arrival at the stag-do venue (the atmosphere sealing the connection between this Cassandra and her Greek mythological namesake). Her vengeance culminates in posing as a nurse-strippergram (multi-coloured streaks in the wig she wears match her fingernail palette), drugging Al’s friends at the bachelor party, taking the groom upstairs and handcuffing him to a bed, telling him her real name is Nina Fisher and trying to carve Nina’s name onto his chest. At which point, Al (Chris Lowell) struggles, partly frees himself, overpowers Cassie and uses a pillow to suffocate her – a lengthy process. Next morning, Al’s pal Joe (Max Greenfield), who made the video recording of Nina’s rape, enters the bedroom to find Al with one hand still attached to the bedhead and the corpse beside him. Joe’s shock switches almost instantly into jokey pragmatism: ‘Killing a stripper at your bachelor party? What is this the 90s? Classic … you want me to get her outta here so you can sleep?’ The two men then burn Cassie’s body.
By way of aftermath, Fennell pulls together the several strands whereby her heroine posthumously has the last word. Ryan receives scheduled texts from Cassie, Green a package containing the phone that Madison gave her, and instructions to follow in the event she doesn’t return from the bachelor party. Under the cash register in the coffee shop, Gail discovers half of a heart-shaped necklace, bearing Cassie’s name. Cassie wore the matching half, with Nina’s name on it, on her final mission and it’s discovered with her remains. Police arrive at the wedding of Al Monroe and his bride Anastasia (Austin Talynn Carpenter), to arrest the groom. Ryan, a guest at the reception, receives a final text from Cassie, signed with her and Nina’s names.
The gruelling length of time it takes Al to kill Cassie sharpens awareness that you expect her to fight back, and prevail. The shock of her death registers even more powerfully in the next few minutes of screen time. Cassie has been in nearly every frame – all the other characters are satellites – and the film briefly seems lost without her. Her absence has an additional effect, though, by reminding us of Nina’s persisting absence. Cassie’s sudden disappearance, at one level, reunites her with her dead friend. Her feelings for Nina give substance not only to the finale, taking it above the level of splashy gotcha, but to Promising Young Woman as a whole.
Whatever Cassie did in the opening minutes may have ‘made her feel great’ but Fennell shows her less and less excited, more and more oppressed, by what she’s driven to do – though without these negative feelings weakening the imperative to avenge what happened to Nina. Until the short-lived romance with Ryan, her obsession is what keeps Cassie going. It’s as if her life otherwise ground to a halt when she lost Nina. There’s no suggestion of a sexual element between them but no doubt either that they loved each other. The potency of this crucial element of the film depends largely, of course, on the actress playing her. This is a markedly different role for Carey Mulligan and you can feel her relish for the challenge. Her superb performance is full of charge and wit yet she also, crucially, creates a bereft undertow. There’s a hint of melancholy behind Cassie’s grins when she’s enjoying herself with Ryan. She knows this can’t last well before she receives the specific proof of why it can’t.
In an early scene, Cassie’s parents are watching The Night of the Hunter on television – the bit where Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell reviles women as ‘Perfume-smelling things … Lacy things. Things with curly hair’. Her parents look away from the TV as they notice Cassie is about to leave the house. She’s meeting Ryan for lunch. ‘You look very pretty,’ says her father, oblivious to what Harry Powell has just said. Emerald Fennell refers again to The Night of the Hunter by way of her most surprising song choice. Cassie, after seeing the rape video, weeps to the accompaniment of ‘Once Upon a Time There Was a Pretty Fly’, the fragile melody that Walter Schumann wrote for Charles Laughton’s masterpiece. The extraordinary sadness of this moment, in which the music’s poignancy and associations fuse with the distress that Carey Mulligan conveys, is a proof of Promising Young Woman‘s emotional complexity. This hard-to-like but truly remarkable film is much concerned with appearances being deceptive. Its own brazen, cosmetic aspect is deceptive too.
27 May 2021
[1] Davis, Clayton (January 29, 2021): “Read the ‘Promising Young Woman’ Script by Emerald Fennell (EXCLUSIVE)”. Variety. Retrieved April 6, 2021. (PDF of the script)