Promising Young Woman

I don't know. I'm really on the fence with Promising Young Woman. On the one hand, this is a message film with a smart message – it's even a film about sexual violence that smartly avoids the question of consent. On the other hand, Promising Young Woman is smug and sleek in places where it doesn't need to be. And it settles for metaphors and symbols in place of real people. And the end is really perplexing. The film itself decides to commit a gruesome act of violence against one of its characters. I don't know how to justify that.

If you haven't seen it stop reading now, but I want to explain myself, so I'm going to describe a couple of moments in the film where I got frustrated with its gaze.

The first was when the protagonist, Cassie, sort of loses it in the middle of the street and take a tire iron to a random stranger's car and breaks the windshield and all the lights. Cassie is having a breakdown. She's frustrated and feeling powerless, and she commits this more-or-less random act of violence, but Promising Young Woman isn't interested in Cassie's experience of this event. Instead, the camera follows... the tire iron. We see Cassie from the back and she breaks the lights and comes around the rear of the car, and then the camera focuses on the car's driver and his experience of the event as he screams at her and calls her crazy. This frustrated me because I felt like it asked me to see the event as an outsider and not as someone who was identifying with Cassie and her experience of this.

The other time the film really lost me was when Cassie is murdered in act three. The film doesn't show Cassie's experience of this event at all. Because Fennell's focus is on plot and surprising the audience, she doesn't have Cassie let us in on what she's planning. We don't know what's going on, and when the man begins murdering her, we are caught up in the question of what is going to happen. The thing is, that Cassie is completely out of the picture by now. Cassie's murder, which takes rather a while, is shot from the murderer's point of view. What we get is his experience of her death – and he's freaked out and panicked, even, to a certain extent, sympathetic, at least in this moment. 

And I'm not sure I forgive the film for this. Promising Young Woman is a good film, but it never really felt dangerous to me. I knew we were in trouble when the screenplay finally reveals that every weekend Cassie pretends to be drunk, performs very elaborate ruses, goes home with these deadbeat assholes, and then lectures them??? Seriously? That's as dangerous as the film wants to get? I think this movie plays it safe the whole time. It feels, moreover, like a kind of morally superior exercise in smugness that cares more about winning than in the actual suffering of survivors of sexual assault.