I still can’t believe Camilla Parker-Bowles is now a two-time Oscar nominee, but she absolutely deserves it.
Emerald Fennell, previously best known for portraying Prince Charles’ affair partner on seasons 3 and 4 of The Crown, now has nominations to her credit for writing the screenplay for and directing Promising Young Woman, a brilliant, shocking, and powerful revenge story that feels incredibly well-timed. Featuring a tremendous lead performance from Carey Mulligan, the film earned five nominations – two for Fennell, one for Mulligan, one for Editing, and, perhaps the big surprise of the five, one for Best Picture. (It’s available to rent on amazon and other streaming services.)
Mulligan plays Cassie, who, as the film opens, is in a bar, alone, and so drunk she can barely sit up straight. A guy in the bar offers to help her get home, but then takes her to his place, where he tries to sexually assault her, at which point Mulligan looks right up at the camera to reveal that she’s stone sober – and she confronts the creep before leaving. This is a regular weekend act for her, and we learn that she dropped out of medical school when her classmate, Nina Fisher, was raped by a classmate at a party, and the school did nothing about it. She’s working in a hipster coffee shop when another classmate, Ryan (Bo Burnham), walks in, and the two start gradually start to have a meet-cute – just at the same time that Cassie gets wind that Nina’s rapist is about to get married, at which point she launches a more elaborate plan to take revenge on everyone involved in the rape and abortive investigation.
Fennell leaves all kinds of clues in the film to indicate that Cassie’s calm exterior demeanor hides the fact that she’s not quite right. Over the course of the story, we learn how Cassie’s life seems to have just stopped after the assault and immediate aftermath. She lives with her parents, who say she has no friends and hasn’t had a boyfriend in years. She’s still wearing a childlike pattern of pastel colors on her nails. Her wardrobe, which seems rather extensive, often veers towards clothing maybe ten years too young for her. She’s supposed to be 30, but alternates between looking 25 and 40 throughout the film. She’s our heroine, and there’s a distinct pleasure in watching her dish it out to various awful men across the film, but there’s also something amiss here, from how and why she left medical school on to just how deranged her plans for the rapist and his enablers are, and Fennell does a spectacular job of balancing those elements so that the conclusion can still work.
The ending is shocking and the subject of many thinkpieces already – this Variety piece has spoilers and does an excellent job breaking it down, and the video with Fennell and Mulligan is well worth the time – and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we watched the movie. Listening to Fennell in that video, in addition to getting a window on to her brilliance as a writer, changed how I interpreted the ending, and that in turn changed some of my thoughts on what came before. Cassie’s life just stopped after Nina was assaulted and everyone – the school administrators, most of their classmates, even one of Nina and Cassie’s best friends – chose to look the other way, and as the film progresses it becomes clearer that the revenge fantasy is at least mixed with the story of Cassie’s unraveling, a satirical condemnation of a system stacked against victims but also a tragedy of a woman whose promise – who was, at least, on her way to living the life her parents wanted for her – is gone. The fact that Cassie would take the risks she ultimately takes without any regard for the effect her injury or death might have on her parents, for example, is a mostly unspoken indicator that Fennell didn’t write Cassie as a flawless heroine.
I’ve seen four of the five Best Actress nominees so far, and Mulligan would be my pick for the award, although the one I haven’t seen is Andra Day, who won the Golden Globe in this category, and the other three nominees are all outstanding – this might be the most loaded category of the season. I’ve also seen four of the five Best Original Screenplay nominees (I’m waiting on Minari), and would choose this over Sound of Metal, Judas and the Black Messiah, or the extra-Sorkiny The Trial of the Chicago 7. I wouldn’t put it over Nomadland for Best Picture, but it might be my #2, with Minari and The Father still on my list to see. I’ll be pulling for this to take home those two honors, though, as it’s tremendous even when there are minor plot points I wish had unfurled differently.
(My wife and I discuss every movie we watch at length, so her opinions always appear somewhere in these reviews, but here she deserves particular credit for shaping my interpretation of this film. As a man, there are issues here I’ve just never had to face in the world, and her perspective was invaluable.)