Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Adam Brody, Ray Nicholson, Sam Richardson, Timothy E. Goodwin, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Alli Hart, Loren Paul, Scott Aschenbrenner, Bo Burnham, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Alison Brie, Gabriel Oliva, Bryan Lillis, Francisca Estevez, Lorna Scott, Connie Britton, Casey Adams, Vince Lozano, Molly Shannon, Max Greenfield, Chris Lowell, Mike Horton, Steve Monroe, Angela Zhou, Austin Talynn Carpenter.
They say, “It’s a man’s world”, however those same people that use the term smugly, with arrogance, and without a sense of thought to what the phrase means to the half that don’t reason with their appendage, they are the ones that desperately need to understand just how their behaviour has caused the just fight back against toxic masculinity.
Yes, there are also women that display the same poisonous traits as the men, however the fact is that the male members of society have always benefited from an advantage, that they have been described, as in one notable case in America in 2016 showed with absolute shame, as promising young men, maybe bloke-ish behaviour taken obscenely too far, their repentance covering only the fact they thoughts about their actions far too late for the victim in some cases to ever respond.
If Promising Young Woman is uncomfortable then so be it, for perhaps we all have gone one step too far and not realised, and whilst we may have made peace with the hi-jinks and the fact that we turned a blind eye to someone else’s behaviour, we should never forget what that feeling in our stomach is, the gut reminding us each and every day of the scars we have left behind.
Emerald Fennell’s visionary take on revenge is not just uncomfortable, it is searingly honest, a dramatic and compelling tale in which Carey Mulligan’s character of Cassandra makes it her life’s work to bring to justice the man who abused her friend, and which caused her to drop out of Medical School and then, by suggestion, cause herself enough harm after not being believed, die.
The viewer doesn’t get to see the moment, because in the end the guilt by association is already imprinted, the sense of fleeting voyeurism on the short camera video is enough to make the skin crawl, to drive home the shame, and ask what would you do when confronted by the evidence, and not the hearsay, of a friend’s conduct? By not showing the moment, the film is critical of the viewer’s response, knowing full well that many times over, we would all say that we never saw a thing; or worse, more cynically, that we would find it amusing in some way, that on a drunken night out, we would show our friends, and get some twisted enjoyment from it. In this Emerald Fennell proves her film’s point completely, and it is all the better for it.
Promising Young Woman is perhaps Carey Mulligan’s finest film to date, one in which she balances the seemingly unhinged revenge bent female perfectly with the sincere and outraged woman taking one would be abuser at a time. With superb contributions from Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Lavern Cox and Bo Burnham, Emerald Fennell’s film is one of the righteous chaos destroying a world, not of the just, but of the out and out abuser; be it mentally, physically, man or woman, the pain of Cassie’s life is one we all we must feel.
Ian D. Hall