OVP: Promising Young Woman (2020)

Film: Promising Young Woman (2020)

Stars: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Chris Lowell

Director: Emerald Fennell

Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Director, Actress-Carey Mulligan, Film Editing, Original Screenplay*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Few films this year have I watched and thought "this would be a total zeitgeist hit if movies were in theaters" more fully than after I finished Promising Young Woman.  Though it's in theaters, most people are still going to be seeing this at-home, away from water coolers & cocktail parties where it could be the center of discussion in the same way that Gone Girl was a few years ago, and that's a darn shame.  Promising Young Woman is a captivating feature, one that ruthlessly shifts genres from one scene to the other, and is a confident, incredible debut (seriously-how is this a debut film?!?) from Emerald Fennell, best-known to most audiences for her work on Call the Midwife and The Crown.  Few films this year have felt so relevant & iconic as you were watching them as this comedic thriller.

(Spoilers Ahead...and I mean it-don't read this if you haven't seen the movie) The movie is about Cassie (Mulligan) a 30-year-old woman who was once pursuing med school with a strong academic caliber, but now lives with her parents, working at a coffeeshop & regularly visiting nightclubs in a state of inebriation...or so we're intended to believe.  Though this was apparent if you saw the trailers, Cassie doesn't actually visit these nightclubs with the intention of hooking up or becoming intoxicated, but instead into seeing which guy will try to bring her home, and potentially try to have sex with her in her inebriated state (and then shows them afterward to be the creeps that they are for trying to hook up with a drunk girl, and lets them know they aren't "nice guys").

This all comes to a head when she realizes two things.  The first is that a guy from her past, Ryan (Burnham) is back and is interested in her romantically.  Cassie has not been open to dating a man in a serious way, but his charm & candor wear her down, and they begin dating.  Ryan lets her know that Al Monroe (Lowell), a fellow classmate of both of theirs, is back in the country about to get married, and Cassie knows that Al raped her (now-dead) best friend, who is the inspiration for her nightly bar trips.  Slowly, Cassie chooses between enacting revenge on those people who helped cover up for Al (including an old school dean and a former classmate, played by Alison Brie) or letting go of this anger & focusing on her relationship with Ryan.

Promising Young Woman puts a lot of care into every scene & every direction it takes.  Up until this point, it's an odd movie in that it seems to have two different stories that clearly cannot meld successfully.  Cassie has enacted revenge on all of these men, and likely needs to move on from this in order to have a healthy relationship with another guy, but she also has not gotten the catharsis she had from her friend Nina's death.  The movie upends what we'd expect (that she'll let it go, and that Ryan will be the guy who convinces her not "all men are bad") when we see a video of the sexual assault, and it turns out that Ryan was there that night.  Cassie then blackmails Ryan into giving her the location of Al's bachelor party...where she goes intent on revenge, but this backfires with a second twist, where Cassie is murdered by Al, and then eventually burned by Al & a friend before a failsafe plan Cassie had created leads to Al's arrest.

The movie sounds long, but it's not-it uses its screen-time judiciously and in service to its plot.  The care shows in aspects you wouldn't always consider.  The movie's soundtrack is crazy good (you'll want to download Paris Hilton's "Stars are Blind" afterward...this might be the best thing to ever happen to her music career), and the casting is sublime.  Fennell seems to have made a point of hiring "nice guy types" like Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Sam Richardson to play the guys who try to date rape Cassie, to underline how we need to reconsider the benefit-of-the-doubt we give to boys-next-door in these stories.

The story might be offputting to some (particularly if you're invested in Bo Burnham's manic pixie dream guy, the twist with his character is a sucker punch), and there are flaws in the character arch's of this film if you think about it too much (particularly since we have no concept of who Cassie is without her Nina revenge story, other than she was once a "promising young woman"), but I don't think you'll care.  I know I didn't.  The film is so persistent, underlining difficult passages with ease, and is aided by a universally strong cast & script.  As a result, Promising Young Woman is that rare creation indeed-a pop culture phenom that actually lives up to its hype.