Review - Promising Young Woman

Just watched Promising Young Woman and WOW. Everyone should watch this.

It’s vicious, clever, funny, terrifying… and absolutely brutal. It holds up a massive, ugly mirror to the nastier underside of toxic male culture and what some men are like. What makes it so disturbing is that it isn’t really interested in obvious monsters. It portrays ordinary, charming, educated, “nice” men. It highlights the crazy amount of moral gymnastics people will perform to allow them to carry on thinking of themselves as good.

It skewers the whole ecosystem around sexual violence: the minimising, the excuses, the friends who laugh, the people who knew, the institutions that rationalise and the deep concern for a promising young man’s future….while the woman whose future was actually destroyed becomes incidental.

It manages to do all of that without turning into a worthy lecture. It’s candy-coloured, stylish.  It is dark and funny, until near the end when it is awful. Awful is the only word.

Carey Mulligan is phenomenal. Cassie is furious, damaged, brilliant, difficult. She is sometimes awful and the film never sanitises her into a flawless feminist “revenge heroine.”

Honestly…it is one of the sharpest films about misogyny I’ve seen. I feel slightly traumatised. I do wish the ending was different but it works because it is so shocking.