The trailers for Promising Young Woman promised a rape-revenge film and I figured that could go one of two ways. It could be an artsy feminist film or it could go the route of gritty exploitation, along the lines of something like I Spit on Your Grave or Ms. 45. If you’re familiar with my reviews, you can probably guess which route I was hoping for. In actuality, I didn’t really get either of those things. Well, I sure as hell didn’t get the second option. For a rape-revenge film, there is very little rape or revenge in the movie. Promising Young Woman is a decent and well-performed character study, but little else. Considering that I expected to either love or hate this movie, I left the theater with a surprising level of indifference.
Carey Mulligan stars as Cassandra, a young woman that dropped out of medical school when her best friend was gang-raped by classmates and the investigation went nowhere. Emotionally scarred by that experience, Cassandra does the only logical thing: She goes to bars on weekends, pretends to be hammered and waits for a guy to try to take advantage of her condition (this tactic never fails because, as the film will incessantly remind you, all men are rapists). This all builds toward her eventual revenge upon the men that raped her friend. Her lame, lame revenge.
With a setup like that, its amazing how toothless this film is. I assumed from the trailers that she was killing the men that attempt to take her home and rape her. Nope, she doesn’t even hurt them. She just startles them by suddenly dropping the drunk act and then lectures them for a bit about what assholes they are. That’s literally it. I didn’t expect the film to go full I Spit on Your Grave and have her castrate the motherfuckers, but I was expecting her to do more than give them a stern talking-to. The finale is also shockingly anticlimactic and idiotic. I won’t ruin the ending, but as far as grand vengeance plans go, this is almost humorously ill-conceived and tame.
With little actual revenge taking place, the film instead pads its running time with unnecessary characters and subplots. We get to see Cassandra confront various people involved in the failed investigation into her friend’s rape, such as the defense lawyer and the Dean of the medical school (who, and I’m not exaggerating, states that such gang rapes are reported to her once or twice every week; I’m not sure why people are still attending this school). These bits all have strong setups that quickly go nowhere because our lead never actually does anything. There is also a painfully predictable subplot about Cassandra finding a new boyfriend; given the film’s views on men, it’s not a huge spoiler to say that this doesn’t go well. All of these characters and subplots are just microcosms of the film as a whole; tense buildups to nothing.
Carey Mulligan is excellent, though. Mulligan is in damn near every scene and carries the film long after the plot has dried up and my interest level tanked. This is, as I mentioned, largely a character study and Mulligan bounces effortlessly between sympathetic and bonkers without ever losing my attention. It is a shame that she ultimately isn’t given much to do, but this review would be much more scathing with a lesser lead performance. It was also nice to see the always-awesome Clancy Brown as her father, the one (presumably) non-rapist male character in the film.
This may be in poor taste given the subject matter, but Promising Young Woman needs to be more ballsy. Once the basic pattern of the film is established, the main character isn’t a threat and it never feels like the stakes are very high. Consequently, any tension or suspense is gone after the first half hour. As a character study with a great lead performance, it may be worth checking out if you are interested in this sort of thing. But if you are looking for more violence and actual revenge in your revenge flicks, look elsewhere (probably something from the 70s).
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*Please note that The Film Nurse disagrees with the Doctor about how entertaining the experience was, but agrees that there should have been violence. That is all.
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Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promising_Young_Woman#/media/File:Promising_Young_Woman_poster.jpg
2 replies on “Promising Young Woman”
best i have ever seen !
First, thank you for making the first comment ever on my site. Second, this is the best movie that you have ever seen?