{"id":23629,"date":"2021-01-14T20:43:07","date_gmt":"2021-01-14T10:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23629"},"modified":"2021-04-14T21:54:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T11:54:23","slug":"promising-young-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23629","title":{"rendered":"Promising Young Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Director:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Emerald Fennell
\nWriter:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Emerald Fennell
\nCast:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Adam Brody, Sam Richardson, Jennifer Coolidge<\/p>\n

Note:\u00a0 contains plot spoilers.<\/em><\/p>\n

T<\/span>he film begins with a woman who is fall down drunk at a bar.\u00a0 She is alone, semi-conscious, struggling to prop herself upright.\u00a0 That’s when she’s noticed by three men.\u00a0 They grin, laugh and roll their eyes at her.\u00a0 One them – Jerry – steps forward, and declares himself a Nice Guy, who’ll take her home.\u00a0 No funny stuff.<\/p>\n

Of course on the ride home in the back of the taxi, Jerry suggests they change course for his apartment.\u00a0 And although she is still completely out of it, he takes her to his room, lays her on his bed and begins kissing her and makes moves to start undressing her.\u00a0 Big mistake.<\/p>\n

That’s when Cassie abruptly changes her tone.\u00a0 Her slur is gone.\u00a0 Her eyes fix themselves on Jerry.\u00a0 She is going to teach him a lesson he will never forget.<\/p>\n

This is the memorable opening scene from\u00a0Promising Young Woman<\/em>, a timely revenge thriller about Cassie, a woman who suffered an undisclosed trauma in college who has now had it her mission to “educate” Nice Guys one at a time using the method of entrapment that snares Jerry.\u00a0 And from seeing her pocketbook which has a list of names, she’s been at this for a long, long time.<\/p>\n

Two things occur that shake up Cassie’s world.\u00a0 During the day she works, disinterestedly, in a coffee shop.\u00a0 She serves Ryan, an old school friend, who asks her out on a date.\u00a0 As you’d expect, she is incredibly dubious and protective of her own feelings, and it takes a lot of charm and courting from Ryan to show her he’s a\u00a0nice guy<\/em> and not a Nice Guy.<\/p>\n

During one particular conversation, he discloses that a mutual schoolfriend Al is returning from London and is planning to get married in their town.\u00a0 This\u00a0lights a fire under\u00a0Cassie as we begin to unravel her past and learn that Al raped her childhood bestfriend Nina who subsequently took her own life.\u00a0 Al’s return is a chance for Cassie to finally get revenge.<\/p>\n

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Before Cassie visits Al’s bucks party to enact her revenge, she visits several people who played a hand in the final stages of Nina’s life.\u00a0 An old friend Madison who didn’t believe Nina and discredited her story.\u00a0 The medical school dean Elizabeth who dismissed Nina’s case for lacking evidence.\u00a0 Al’s lawyer who is riddled with guilt and feels complicit in letting a guilty man walk free.\u00a0 In her own creative way, Cassie exacts a measure of vengeance on each of these people.\u00a0 Although tonally the films are worlds apart, these scenes reminded me of\u00a0Spotlight<\/em> and the line about how “it took a village” to let down the people who were abused by the church priests.\u00a0 So many are complicit and turn a blind eye or actively make it harder for the abused to get justice.<\/p>\n

Carey Mulligan turns in an incredible performance in Promising Young Woman<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s a tricky role.\u00a0 Revenge thrillers by their nature are a very OTT genre but giving the real world sensitivity of the #MeToo subject matter, how do you play this part?\u00a0 Mulligan walks a tightrope act where her quiet moments of solitude portray a genuine sadness and\u00a0believable sense of grief but once she has a Nice Guy in her sights she exudes a chaotic energy and boldness that absolutely commands your attention.<\/p>\n

There is a real cleverness to the casting of the guys in Promising Young Woman<\/em> too.\u00a0 Casting directors Lindsay Graham and Mary Vernieu have assembled a Who’s Who of Hollywood nice guys who have made successful careers out of being moralistic, charming and likeable.\u00a0 Not the bigwigs like Tom Hanks.\u00a0 They would feel out of place in a movie like this.\u00a0 But Adam Brody (The O.C<\/em>), Chris Lowell (Veronica Mars<\/em>), Sam Richardson (Veep<\/em>)<\/span>\u00a0and\u00a0Christoph Mintz-Plasse (Superbad<\/em>) are all inspired pieces of casting.\u00a0 Guys that the audience are automatically programmed to look upon favourably and who’s behaviour is incredibly jarring when they reveal their true nature and attitudes towards women.<\/p>\n

This is Emerald Fennell’s first film.\u00a0 It is both ambitious and audacious.\u00a0 When assembled next to the rest of this year’s excellent catalogue of Best Picture nominees,\u00a0Promising Young Woman<\/em> has a rough-hewn quality to it that sets it apart from the others.\u00a0 Tonally, it’s a little all over the place and the film occasionally strains under the weight of its own ambition and ideas.\u00a0 Having said that, I still think this is an incredible first feature and I’ve always admired creators who swing for the fences, even if not every idea fully sticks (think\u00a0Guillermo Del Toro, Stephen King etc).<\/p>\n

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Promising Young Woman<\/em> has a rather divisive ending.\u00a0 It kind of feels like Fennell\u00a0wrote herself into a corner and\u00a0I’ve read that multiple different endings were discussed with the studio,\u00a0with an even darker ending than the one we got ultimately being dismissed for being too tough for the audience to handle.\u00a0 The actual ending we get is rather contrived and well and truly stretches credulity but I guess it feels cathartic in its own way.\u00a0 Cassie herself was seeking a closure she would never find and this ending sort of caps that off whilst making sure the abusers face sufficient retribution for their actions.<\/p>\n

Ultimately,\u00a0Promising Young Woman<\/em> is a\u00a0fantastic\u00a0revenge thriller that is both highly topical and hugely entertaining.\u00a0 It manages to get pulses racing without ever overtly resorting to excessive gore, with the implied violence from the threat of Mulligan’s words being more than ample.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young woman, traumatized by a tragic event in her past, seeks out vengeance against those who crossed her path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":23631,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2886,858,2968,2970,2969],"class_list":["post-23629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-adam-brody","tag-carey-mulligan","tag-emerald-fennell","tag-jennifer-coolidge","tag-sam-richardson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23629"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23637,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23629\/revisions\/23637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}