Where to begin? From Emerald Fennell, most well-known for show running Killing Eve in its second season, “Promising Young Woman” is an acid soaked take on the revenge thriller, bolstered by phenomenal performances, a tightly wound script, and an absolutely career defining lead performance.
It’s been thrown around quite a bit in the pre-release advertising but make no mistake, this is a film for exactly the moment in which we live. There’s an anger and spitefulness behind this entire story that feels like it could only have been made right now.
Carey Mulligan (“The Great Gatsby,” “Inside Llewyn Davis”) plays Cassie with such real boiling anger. Her performance is nothing short of breathtaking as she teeters between a character so ahead of everyone else, so in her element, and yet so impulsive and at times idiotic that it becomes impossible to tell what direction she or the film will take next. Bo Burnham (“Eighth Grade,” “Zach Stone is Gonna Be Famous”) is also equally good, though his performance is more one-note that Mulligan’s. It doesn’t change the talent on display and the true impressive way in which he pulls off this roll that is completely different than anything he’s done before.
Everyone in this film is expertly crafted and performed, even if they’re only on screen for mere moments. Alfred Molina (“Spider-Man 2,” “An Education”), for example, is onscreen for maybe 5 minutes and yet his short time here won’t be forgotten. The same goes for the rest of the supporting cast including Laverne Cox (“Orange is the New Black,” “Doubt”), Alison Brie (“Community,” “GLOW”), Connie Britton (“Friday Night Light,” “American Horror Story”), Max Greenfield (“New Girl,” “A Futile and Stupid Gesture”), and Chris Lowell (“Private Practice,” “Graves”).
Now, there’s a lot to unpack with a movie like this. From the trailer alone it’s clear that “Promising Young Woman” deals with sexual assault, survivor’s guilt, believing victims, victim blaming, and a whole lot more. Describing the overall film as a pulpy revenge thriller feels like doing it a disservice but there’s no other way to describe it.
Colors pop from every frame, from sky blues to bubblegum pinks. Neon is everywhere and the framing of background elements over Cassie as she glides through these sequences like a fallen angel are clearly hallmarks of a director who is taking advantage of having full control over her work. Fennell and cinematographer Benjamin Kračun (“The Third Day”) take full advantage of the staged, almost storybook styled sets to create a mouse trap of a film that creeps in more and more as thing progress and the bright blues and pinks become less and less comforting.
The slow churning score, featuring numerous string cues and reworkings of classic female centric songs, like the cover of Toxic heavily utilized in the film’s marketing, set the stage for a film rife with tonal shifts like skateboard ramps. Anthony Willis’s (“Fortnite”) score is an absolute perfect fit for Fennell’s twisted tale, as if you ground up the bright atmosphere and acidic dialogue and pressed it into a record. It’s a great compliment to the wild tonal shifts that Fennell handles so wonderfully gracefully, and it all comes back to how deathly seriously the film takes itself.
Even as moments flip and flop back and forth from musical montage to virtually silent feats of tension, the events taking place are always treated with the same level of intensity by the actors, crew, and Fennell herself. Directing from her own script, the dialogue feels punchy and alive. Some might find it hokey, the way each line feeds to the next, but it’s the same kind of flow that Tarantino has been using for years. Think Tarantino and Sorkin with an acid-soaked sense of humor.
It’s not a film that asks you to identify or even agree with its protagonist and what she’s doing, merely experience this tale with her. So many moments seem cherry picked to create discussions, from the way that scenes and characters are framed to the specific pieces of dialogue used in certain moments.
Everything comes to a head in the third act though, as plot and style come crashing together in a thundering cacophony of color and dread. It’s when Fennell’s film is at its more somber and also most delirious, as it fully commits to the grim nature of its tale and the pulpy thrills therein. The ending, to not mince words, will be remembered and discussed for years to come.
This is not only a daring and audacious first feature from Fennell, but an absolutely thrilling, grounded adventure that will be remembered for a long time. It’s a singular vision of a film, laser focused to communicate one feeling and one message as effectively and expertly as possible. Whether it’s the superb performances, the sense of production design, costuming, narrative style, music, or any of the other numerous elements; “Promising Young Woman” is, without a doubt, one of the best films of the year. 5/5
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