Promising Young Woman (2020)
(On Cable TV, September 2021) I was not looking forward to Promising Young Woman. On paper, especially with spoilers (it’s hard to resist not looking up the synopsis when nearly every reviewer raves about the ending), it feels like a buzzword bingo regurgitating the past few years in gender-based social activism: female filmmakers unloading grievances is not anything new or all that original. I’ve seen many such movies over the past few years, and they’re starting to blur together in clichés: all female protagonists are traumatized, all male characters are bad, the police/justice system won’t save you, violent revenge is the way to go, and so on. But to see Promising Young Women being nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award gave me some hope that it would go beyond the obvious — while the Oscars have always courted the approval of the chattering class for their social activism (remember: The Academy Awards are the façade of what Hollywood would like us to think about Hollywood), they don’t usually go out of the way to nominate bad films. And indeed, it doesn’t take a long time to figure out that, despite soapbox messages and an aggressive intention to provoke, Promising Young Woman is a really well-crafted thriller, propelled by writer-director Emerald Fennell’s genuinely daring storytelling, great scene-to-scene narrative momentum (even in the film’s most difficult to watch moments) and well-crafted pacing. It is meant not just to press buttons, but to hammer them with glee, daring viewers to keep up with an escalation in revenge narratives. I’m not going to pretend to be unmoved or un-scandalized by the result — I certainly have issues with the mini-speeches featured in the narrative (oh, there’s the bit about nice guys, there’s the bit about women keeping other women down, there’s the bit about the judicial system being terrible… and there’s the inevitable bit about the seemingly good guy not being such a good guy) and I could pick apart the script showing where everyone reacts to the heroine with further confrontation, further justifying the film’s point of view. But I’m not really interested in scoring points: the film doesn’t let the protagonist’s aberrant behaviour go unquestioned, and the ending is indeed something that navigates a very fine line between a downbeat lesson and a triumph of warped justice. Carey Mulligan (an actress I don’t usually very much) is terrific here in playing a complex character that’s not necessarily meant to be a virtuous avenging angel. Bo Burnham is also quite good as a male lead who spans a spectrum of good or bad. But the star here is a script that, despite a few annoyances, does manage something fresh and compelling even with brutal material that riffs on emerging clichés. Promising Young Woman is far from my favourite film of the year, but I understand the acclaim and the Oscar nomination. I even get how, in its own way, it could be a moral lesson of sorts: To repeat something I’ve said about the not-dissimilar Fatal Attraction, this is the kind of story we tell ourselves to keep each other in line.
