Let’s start off with some positives—Promising Young Woman is compelling from start to finish, and has a number of pretty good jokes.
The problem is that it isn’t the movie that it thinks it is. It feels on its face as if it’s a no-holds-barred, revenge-fuelled exploitation film full of wicked satire and pointed commentary. Instead it’s a confused film that doesn’t cut as deep as it should, full of one of the most bizarre protagonists in recent memory. It’s a Twitter thread come to life, as loud and as shallow as you could imagine.
Let’s have a full spoilers break down: The film follows Cassie Thomas, a barista and med school drop-out who has spent her every weekend for years going to a bar and acting under the influence until some ‘nice guy’ comes to help her, takes her home, and assaults her. As soon as they do, she snaps back to sobriety, gives them a stern talking to about their behaviour, and then goes home. This is, ostensibly, her only hobby.
She was driven to this because her closest friend and former classmate Nina was driven to ending her life after being assaulted in med school, and when she meets and begins dating one of her former classmates, she’s pulled back in to that case, living a double life between her budding romance and enacting revenge on each person involved in Nina’s assault. She can’t let go of what happened, even after Nina’s mother begs her to move on.
The female friend who didn’t believe them? She gets her to imbibe too much and then makes her think she too has been assaulted. The school’s dean who dismissed the case? She tricks her into thinking teenage daughter is being assaulted. And the man who assaulted her friend? She infiltrates his bachelor party, drugs each of the attendants, before isolating him, lecturing him on what he did, and decides to carve her late friend’s name into his chest.
She doesn’t succeed at the last one, however. Instead, the man smothers her with a pillow, disposing of her body in the wilderness. The big twist at the end is that she anticipated this may happen, sends a letter to a bad lawyer turned good, and gets him arrested for her murder.
Maybe there’s more that I’m not seeing, but all I can see is a film about a person seemingly pushed over the edge who also refuses to step over it, that pulls its best punches and leaves too many doors closed. It’s hard to know if the script went through one too many drafts, or one too few. Either way, not even a committed performance from Carey Mulligan can save it.
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