A Promising Young Woman
A Promising Young Woman was first brought to my attention way back in the “before time.” The premise: a young woman goes to a different bar every night, pretends to get drunk off her ass, gets a “nice guy” to bring her home, then confronts him just as he’s about to take advantage of her. When I first saw the trailer, I knew it was something I had to see.
“Sounds like something I would do, tbh,” I’d mutter silently to myself.
As the apocalypse unfolded before me, I slowly forgot about it all. That is, until my dad and stepmom told me it was out and, more shockingly, they had seen it.
“It’s a really dark satire,” my stepmom explained. “Also, there’s a HUGE twist at the end.”
Twist?
Satire?
We’ll see.
Spoilers ahead.
My first viewing was with a group of girlfriends, which I highly recommend. A lot of comments such as, “he’s hot” and “oooooh yummy.” And then, before we know it, we realize he could be a total predator. Yes, even the “confirmed nice guy” boyfriend has a shitty, inexcusable past! I hate to be dark here (but, I mean, that is the tone of this film), but, eh, such is life. A Promising Young Woman’s darkly comedic tone is precisely what allows it to weave in and out of the experiences of perpetrators and victims, the concepts of victim and victimhood, heroism and revenge. What is justice, and can we ever really achieve it? I think what writer/director Emerald Fennell is saying is, absolutely not, and that sucks.
Trauma is buried deep within our bones, even when we aren’t conscious of it. Sometimes, it even provides a roadmap for our lives. It informs what jobs we take, the kinds of relationships we form, how we interact with our family and friends. In the case of Cassie, our main character, trauma manifests itself in a literal crusade, wherein she hunts down potential predators, exposes them, and….? We don’t really know what actually happens next. That’s all left up to interpretation. After her first conquest of the film, Jerry, we see Cassie holding up a jelly-filled donut. The jelly is smeared all over her face. It trickles down her arm. At first glance, a gasp. Is that- no, that’s just a jelly donut! But it could have just as easily been Jerry’s heart that she was eating.
After each one of Cassie’s conquests, we witness her retrieving a tiny notebook from under her bed filled with tallies and names of men. She wraps a little girl’s scrunchie around the book when it isn’t in use. When it is in use, she wraps the scrunchie around her hand in a ritualistic manner. The notebook is very “little black book” meets “dear diary,” and we soon find out that there is lots to Cassie’s development that lags. Although she’s nearly 30 years old, she chooses to live with her parents, chooses to work for minimum wage at a local coffee shop when her boss clearly thinks she can aspire to greater things, and most importantly, she plays a game of dress-up every weekend. She could just as well go as herself when she goes crusading. Instead, she finds it necessary to make personas or caricatures of women who might be picked up by whatever crowd of men she finds herself in. When we meet Jerry, for instance, and his finance bros in suits, Cassie is also in a smart, light blue button-up blouse with a black pencil skirt and plain black pointy-toed heels. When she meets cocaine-fueled Neil, she dons smudged eyeliner and puts feathers in her hair to create a groupie/hippie vibe. She is luring her prey in any way she can.
I mentioned before that this film is classified as a “dark comedy” or a “satire,” but I’d argue there’s nothing really comedic about it. For myself, it’s simply the truth. Good guys are hard to find, even when they are “good guys.” Any woman (including myself) who has ever been assaulted will find it harder to trust anyone and easier to assume that any man could be a predator. It’s not difficult to see why Cassie sees men the way she does. This operation, we are led to believe, is entirely because Cassie’s childhood friend, Nina, was raped by a group of men while they were in medical school together. At first, I thought the big twist of this film was that Nina actually never existed and Cassie was the one who was brutally raped. This wasn’t the case, however, and I’m glad it wasn’t. This shows us that the issue shouldn’t be distant and should be personal to all women, and not just those who have experienced this firsthand. Wait… let me correct that statement: it should be personal to all people. “Women” are just the tip of the iceberg. What about Black women? Latin women? Asian women? Trans women? Trans women of color? This is not at all an exhaustive list, but each one has “a promising young woman” of their own.
The title itself was inspired by Brock Turner’s trial, when the media dubbed him a “promising young man” in the face of imprisonment (he only served six months). Fennell’s film shows the other perspective while also showing Cassie as both victim and perpetrator. We don’t know what exactly happens to these men before she tallies them up in her book, but, as the story progresses, she claims to be virtually harmless. And I believe her. Her torture is psychological and likely just a ploy to get even with the men who made Nina feel like she was no longer “Nina”: she belonged to them. She says to Al, Nina’s rapist:
“She was just Nina. And then she wasn’t. Suddenly she was someone else. She was yours. It wasn’t her name she heard when she was walking around. It was yours. Your name. All around her. All over her all the time. And it just squeezed her out…. Al, you should be the one with her name all over you”
Cassie’s final words before she is suffocated to death by the very man who destroyed Nina’s life. Nothing physically abusive ever really happens to Al or Jordan the lawyer or Dean Walker or Madison (her “reckonings”). It’s all psychological trickery, aimed at torturing them in the same way Nina was tortured up until her final moments. Do I agree with her plots? I don’t know. For myself and my own situation, I’ve decided to take the higher ground. I try to keep his face out of my life. I try to keep his friends and associates far away as well, in case he ever pops up on someone’s Instagram story (it has happened once or twice) or Facebook feed. I try to refrain from contacting his girlfriend and telling her exactly what happened to me. And for these reasons, I’m on the verge of disagreeing with Cassie’s revenge. On one hand, it’s not Cassie’s revenge to execute. On the other, no one is left to fight for Nina.
One thing’s for sure though. If there were a Cassie out there, I’d do nothing to stop her.
POSTSCRIPT: Other aspects of the film to consider…
-Institutions: Cassie punishing higher education, law enforcement, the justice system, social spheres, etc.
-Cinematography: the film’s neon bright, Euphoria-like color scheme brings light and a 90s vibe to a dismal, dark plot.
-Music: all-female-generated, many remixes of classics that bolster the female gaze
-Female Gaze: travels in and out of the movie, is most prevalent in the very first scene, where all we see is a sea of men’s crotches wearing nearly identical dress shirts and trousers.
