Promising Young Woman

Promising Young Woman is a clear demonstration of how an excellent central performance can establish a tone or level of quality completely independent to the best efforts of the overall piece, creating, in effect, a sub-film. Any deviation from this micro-continuity is not just jarring, it can actually repulse. Carey Mulligan's Cassandra is Promising Young Woman's main character, so naturally her thoughts and actions dictate the ebb and flow for the majority of the film. Mulligan plays withdrawn and dour, manifesting stakes that match the severity of the film's premise - a grieving friend attempting to dominate, then punish, the specific kind of men who see women, and their bodies, as interchangeable or, in their most vile instances, expendable. 

Cassandra posts up in bars then feigns a collapsing, sickly kind of drunkenness that attracts would-be rapists. These men consider their sexuality in predatory terms - Cassandra catering to their mindset by framing herself as, essentially, prey. Alice Lowe's Prevenge initially seems to be a touching point, an apparently similar tale about a vulnerable woman using well-worn intersocial tracks to place herself in tense situations before staging bloody murder, but writer-director Emerald Fennell's film isn't so clear-cut. Cassandra reprimands rather than kills, often unloading the real, physical, labour of retaliation to a proxy. Promising Young Woman then seeks to confound, doing so in clear opposition to, not only the revenge genre it purports to be operating in, but also the strange, disassociated mood relentlessly generated by Mulligan. 

That Promising Young Woman is structured to deny a visceral sense of satisfaction is commendable in one sense - Fennell constantly works against an easy route - but leaves the film feeling vague and strangely unfocused. Side-characters further chip away at the edifice. Molly Shannon's bereaved mother is saddled with an underdeveloped sequence that momentarily suggests the bullet point stanza of police procedurals while Max Greenfield's late, tonally aggressive, appearance recalls gross-out comedy Very Bad Things by way of his own television show New Girl. Here the film, having jettisoned its focal point, takes on what can only be described as a metatextual quality, trapping the viewer in the repellent company of the flip-phone videographers who create transparent fictions as a way to power through their own outrageous behaviour. Thankfully, all of them - even a faded love interest - are portrayed as self-serving scum.