Review | Promising Young Woman movie review: Carey Mulligan’s star turn in kitschy Oscar nominee that isn’t exactly a rape revenge comedy
- The film, with its story about the abused needing a voice, is a study of victimhood and grief that feels born out of the recent #MeToo and Time’s Up movements
- While not entirely successful, it features a brave and confident performance by Carey Mulligan as med school dropout Cassie Thomas
3/5 stars
One of the most talked-about films of the past year, the Oscar-nominated, Bafta Award-winning Promising Young Woman is like a high-wire act all by itself.
Written and directed by British actress/filmmaker Emerald Fennell, the movie has been described in some quarters as a “rape revenge comedy”. How does that work, you might be wondering? Most vengeance films – think The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for example – come rubber-stamped with gloom and doom. Violence is always the endgame.
Fennell’s film is designed to make the viewer uncomfortable right from the outset when med school dropout Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) is seen drunk in a bar and is escorted home by a man who only has one thing on his mind. Except that she’s not inebriated at all, and he is soon left regretting his actions. Maybe.
Fennell, who previously worked on Killing Eve, the ultra-violent television series about a female assassin, is coy about violence here. Revenge is definitely a dish best served, well, off screen.
