Carey Mulligan has been one of the most incredible actors on screen since her debut in An Education. Her turn in Shame is one of the best performances I have ever seen. She has found what could be a career topping role with Promising Young Woman, but that being said with this actor, she'll likely top it again in a few more films. But regardless her Cassie is going to be memorable.
Writer/director Fennell has crafted an intricate, clever subversion of every film dating trope, clearly exposing the violence in the ways our culture has set up courting rituals, making the totality of our cultural violence against women explicitly clear, in a way that is clearly unnerving and awakening. Part of its brilliance is how it does this by making it entertaining, almost seductive itself, only to pull the rug out from under us again making the point even more real. Fennell's story is brilliantly laid out, working on so many levels, and just when you think you have it figured out, she ups it one more time. Watch the way she plays us, gives us many opportunities to think things are okay, or that our whole way of understanding romance isn't messed up, and then reveals to us a difficult and uncomfortable truth.
Promising Young Woman is shocking, because of just how much it makes clear what is right before our eyes, and how much of that we are willfully blind to. Our complicity is on display and she's made it all delicious in a way so that we can't look anywhere but at ourselves to blame.
Promising Young Woman shows us just how great the toll of violence against women is, how pervasive, how much its ripples permeate all aspects of our culture. It never blinks in limiting things to "good" or "bad" people, never falling in to gender binary traps, it even begins a racial analysis related to these issues, although it really could have done more on that front. But it is fearless in its take, a slap in our faces and the promise that maybe we'll wake up.
Promising Young Woman
Staring: Carey Mulligan, Laverne Cox, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Sam Richardson, Alfred Molina, Molly Shannon, Chris Lowell, Max Greenfield
Writer/Director: Emerald Fennell
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