PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Emerald Fennell (15, 113 mins)
Emerald Fennell, Camilla in the recent series of The Crown and showrunner on the latest series of Killing Eve, makes her feature debut as writer/director of this excellent twisted drama that confronts gender politics and toxic masculinity head-on. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a woman who gets drunk at bars and sees the calibre of the men who want to take care of her, exacting a deep-seated revenge on a tragedy from her student days. A promising medical student, something changed when her best friend Nina killed herself. The film tantalizingly teases out the details in witty, acerbic style.
Cassie is drifting, staying at home with tolerant loving parents (a gentle Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge); they want her to move on from what happened to her best friend, but she cannot. She grumpily works in a coffee shop by day and stalks predatory men by night. Her love life is properly rekindled by Bo Burnham’s Ryan, who meets her by chance: a former peer of hers at medical school, they connect in winning offbeat style, but he also re-introduces her to people involved with what happened to Nina. Cassie is left to decide how to enact a vengeance of sorts, meeting up with Alison Brie’s settled mother of twins, Madison, college dean Connie Britton and Chris Lowell’s Al Monroe – the successful, about-to-be-wed man at the centre of the tragedy.
Fennell brilliantly captures Mulligan’s driven vengeance, her need to turn the tables on men who take advantage of drunk women – amongst them Adam Brody’s apparent Good Samaritan and Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s self-involved would-be writer. The comedy is pitch-dark but well played, and Burnham and Mulligan make a winning couple, a ray of hope amidst the murky morality. A daring final act shocks, but its narrative bravery adds to the overall themes of women being exploited and silenced and the prejudices of the patriarchy. A brilliant debut with excellent performances: Emerald Fennell is herself a Promising Young Woman.
In cinemas from Fri 12 Feb
words KEIRON SELF