Promising Young Woman, nominated for Best Actress (Carey Mulligan), Best Director (Emerald Fennell) and Best Picture at this year’s Academy Awards, has been gaining attention for its narrative that plays off the rape revenge genre, following Cassie (Carey Mulligan) who seeks to make society—and especially “nice guys”—pay for the sexual assault of her best friend Nina while they were in medical school, who then committed suicide during the aftermath.
Instead of being a 'fiery #MeToo' tale, Emerald Fennell’s directorial debut is a performative, self-obsessed narrative that can’t seem to dedicate itself tonally or morally to anything in particular.
Performative Activism
Nothing feels more pointlessly performative about Promising Young Woman than the actions of Cassie herself. The film opens with her taking up a faux-drunk persona in a bar, causing one of those self-proclaimed “nice guys” Jerry (Adam Brody) to offer to take her home, and when they end up at his apartment, he fixes her a strong drink instead of the water she asks for. With Cassie collapsed back onto the bed, her arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose, Fennell’s camera cuts to a waist up, overhead shot as Jerry moves between Cassie’s legs and makes his way south. Cassie looks directly into the camera, her drunken slur dropping away to reveal a stone-cold sober snarl of “I said what are you doing?” Tense strings rise in the score, Cassie doesn’t break eye contact with him, or the audience, and smirks.
It then cuts away immediately to the Promising Young Woman title card and the audience is left confused by Cassie’s actions, wondering what happened in the space between that moment and when we next see her, barefoot and wandering down the street the next morning. Hidden under her bed she has a notebook covered in tally marks which is she gleefully adds to before placing it back where no one else can see.
Everything about this moment suggests that Cassie has killed this man or at the very least enacted some kind of devastating violent revenge against him—and in fact, much of the marketing for the film played on this concept, with one poster warning “take her home and take your chances”, and another showing Mulligan brandishing a tire-iron.
It is only later on in the film where Cassie repeats her performance to another stranger, Neil (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) that the audience is able to see what all those little tallies indicate and how she has been able to avenge Nina’s death.
She lectures them.
This woman, so hurt and devastated by her best friend’s suicide, believes somehow that the answer to systemic sexual violence, victim-blaming, and the sexual assault of women, is to blast into a prepared speech. Cassie’s crusade leans into the concept of performative activism—something that became “closely linked to the Black Lives Matter movement” after Summer 2020 with the concept of “Black Out Tuesday”.
Performative activism is about gaining social capital for caring or appearing to care, about justice, equality, and structural form without putting the work in beyond that. Promising Young Woman goes so far as to show how much Cassie’s strategy has little effect—during an attempted pick up the man she is with realizes she’s sober and angrily tells her to “take her crazy somewhere else” and recognizes her as “the bitch Jerry took home." Clearly, after their encounter, Jerry has simply covered up the verbal dressing down he received by simply reverting to the sexist trope of ‘a crazy ex’ rather than confronting his own actions.
The revenge that Cassie has dished out simply allows for the men she targets to brush the experience under the carpet, ignore the encounter as a bad night and carry on with their lives without consequence.
This is not to say that Cassie isn’t passionate about what she is doing, but in a film that has leaned heavily on the concept of the avenging woman, this revelation that she is just telling people off truly feels like a gut-punch of disappointment from which the film never recovers.
Silencing Survivors of Sexual Assault
Cassie’s reasoning behind her actions, her decisions to drop out of medical school and spend her life pretending to be drunk in bars to lure in the predatory men, is all placed on the shoulders of a woman we never get to truly see. Nina only ever appears in photo collages on Cassie’s computer, a name half-remembered by those she went to college with, a tragic citation that lurks within the memories of those who knew her. In her feature on Promising Young Woman for RogerEbert.com Mary Beth McAndrews argues that throughout the narrative of the film, “sexual assault survivor being stripped of her personhood” and Nina has become “an idea that Cassie has based her entire identity around rather than a full human being”.
This is brought to a head when Cassie finally confronts Nina’s rapist, Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), at his bachelor party in a remote cabin in the woods. Dressed as a stripper with chaotic pastel-colored hair, she handcuffs Al to the bed with the intention of carving Nina’s name into his skin—but this is far from the cry of feminist victory that the film frames it as. Instead, it simply furthers the removal of Nina from the narrative.
Cassie's intention is to make sure that Al can never forget Nina’s name, but she gives no thought to the reality of this act which will indelibly link Nina to Al as she is branded onto his skin forever. Cassie does not seem to care about what Nina would have wanted, or even how ultimately pointless this potential act—it is literally skin-deep—would be. Even in death, Nina is unable to escape her rapist, she is still denied peace.
Cassie’s intended plan shares several parallels with Lisbeth Salander’s revenge that she enacts on her own rapist in Stieg Larsson The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo—brought to the screen by Niels Arden Oplev in Män som hatar kvinnor in Sweden, and David Fincher in the American version The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo two years later. Also using handcuffs, Lisbeth restrains her legal guardian to his own bed, sets up a video camera, and records a confession to the rape which she uses to regain her independence from the state.
With a flourish, she also produces a tattoo gun and covers his chest in the phrase “I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST” ensuring that he is literally never able to escape his crime or decontextualize his branding. Lisbeth has been able to choose this decision as the most cathartic way to express her rage and hurt from sexual violence, while in Promising Young Woman, Nina is left voiceless, a conduit for Cassie to process her emotions without a thought about what Nina would want.
Promising Young Woman doesn’t achieve what the creative team believes it does—rather than a film that ignites the passions of its viewers or challenges any prevailing social narrative, it ends with a whimper instead of a bang. Combining pastel colors, sexual assault revenge and a female protagonist isn’t enough to be radical—what matters is what the film sets out to do and Promising Young Woman simply upsets in all the wrong ways.
Get your copy of the Promising Young Woman Blu-ray by clicking here.
Get your copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Blu-ray by clicking here.
To explore more of Emerald Fennell's work as an author, order her first novel Shiverton Hall.