End of ‘Promising Young Woman’ Explained

First, for God’s sake, don’t read this story or watch the video unless you’ve seen Emerald Fennell’s “promising young woman”. Just stop now – unless, of course, you love spoilers, in which case … go ahead.

In “Promising Young Woman,” Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, whose best childhood friend, Nina, was raped during a loud party at medical school. Although we can never find out exactly what happened next, what emerges is that Nina dropped out of school after a fictional investigation – and Cassie too, to look after her. We also know that Nina is dead.

Sometime before the action started on the film, Cassie started devoting herself to avenging Nina. She goes to bars and acts like bullshit, and inevitably a man catches her, he tells himself and possibly his brothers, to take her home safely. When he, once again inevitably, starts having sex with her – without her consent – Cassie then says that she is completely sober, embarrassing him. Upon returning home, where she lives with her parents, she makes a mark on a notebook and feels satisfied and very sad.

If cinemas were currently open across the country, audiences would be coming out of cineplexes talking energetically about “promising young woman” – about Mulligan’s performance and what it says about the world we live in. They would also be arguing – and probably arguing – about their demise. Now that it is available on VOD, perhaps these conversations will take place in living rooms, by text and (God help us) on Twitter.

(Last chance, spoilerphobes.)

In the third act of the film, Ryan (Bo Burnham), Cassie’s new boyfriend, broke her heart: She found out that he witnessed Nina’s rape – possibly even inciting the rapist Alexander Monroe (Chris Lowell). In fact, we’ve never seen the video that her former classmate Madison (Alison Brie) gave Cassie. But whatever Cassie sees (and hears), it drives her to confront Ryan, break up with him and blackmail him to help her locate Al for his culminating revenge.

And then Cassie goes to find Al, who is celebrating his bachelor party with his best friends in a remote cabin in the woods. Cassie, dressed as a stripper in a nurse’s uniform, drugs the malicious men and takes Al upstairs to a room. She handcuffs him on the bed and tries to force him to confess what he did. Instead, he is able to turn the tide against her and choke her to death with a pillow in an agonizing and almost silent two-minute sequence. In the morning, his best friend Joe (Max Greenfield) meets him next to Cassie. Together, they burn your body.

The police begin investigating her disappearance, and it seems that, because of Cassie’s angry hobby, Al is going to get away with it. But Cassie is nothing but a bright and promising young woman.

As plan B, she sent evidence of Nina’s sexual assault to Al’s former lawyer (Alfred Molina), who would very much like to regret the choices she made as a lawyer years ago. Whatever Cassie sent as evidence of her disappearance (we never see), the police find her remains.

At Al’s wedding reception, with Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” as background music, Ryan begins to receive pre-scheduled text messages from Cassie, provoking him. “Enjoy the wedding!” he reads, while the police arrest Al. “Love, Cassie and Nina.” The final image of the film is a winky emoticon – certainly the biggest use of an emoticon in the history of cinema.

For VarietyThe cover story of “Promising young woman”, Fennell and Mulligan discussed the ending extensively.

The ending of “Promising Young Woman” was not Fennell’s original idea for the conclusion.

The first version of the script ended with Al and Joe burning Cassie’s body. In other words, dark as hell! Fennell’s financiers hesitated and she said laughing, “They were like, ‘Come on, let’s give you money to do this!’ But in my heart, I think this is where it would all have ended. “

When she originally sat down to write the script, Fennell had another ending in mind – one in which Cassie enters Al’s bachelor party and triumphs – “the big, fuck, cathartic ending,” she said, in which Cassie ” is going to put on a sexy outfit and she’s going to kill a ton of guys! ”

“It was never written,” she continued, “because the moment Cassie is in that room, I realized that there is no way to show it honestly. Because it is not true. And it was important for me to interpret as realistically as possible, what that would be like. “

In fact, Fennell realized that the end of fuck’s revenge was physically impossible: “I can’t imagine being in a room with a man and threatening him where everything unfolds in a different way – no matter how much we want it to be.”

After all, from Al’s point of view, he would be scared for his life. On set, Fennell said to Lowell: “You are a good guy. You love your boyfriend! Something happened at university that you barely remember with a girl who was, as far as you know, madly drunk, and always had sex with everyone.

“This woman is going to do something terrible to you,” she said. “You are going to fight for your life and this is going to be horrible for both of you.”

But make no mistake – Fennell loves the on-screen ending.

“Someone as meticulous as Cassie doesn’t go to a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a ton of drunk men thinking that something bad might not happen,” said Fennell. “And then she made sure that, if she didn’t come back, they would all be exposed.”

Mulligan agreed. She said they filmed a scene that didn’t make it into the movie, in which Cassie had a bruise on her hand, showing that one of her nights looking for bad men in bars “went wrong”. She knows that she is always putting herself in danger and, in the case of Al’s bachelor party, “she knows that this is a very, very strong possibility” that she will die. But for Cassie, “it is worth taking the immense risk”.

Mulligan said that Cassie is “arrogant with her life because of you”.

Cassie would also know that she wouldn’t be able to count on Ryan. In fact, when the police come to ask him about her disappearance – which would be a chance for him to do the right thing and say that she went to Al’s party – he protects his old friend and cheats on her – reinforcing the detective’s idea that she was “unstable”.

“She was not in a good place,” Ryan tells him.

“He So wants to be good, ”said Fennell. “But he is not going to blow his own life.”

And then there’s this: imagining Al being stuck in his own marriage is something that Fennell thinks Cassie would like. “I think Cassie has a very, very sick sense of humor,” she said, laughing. – And I think the idea of ​​destroying Al’s wedding would almost have been worth it for her. She hates him so much! “

Mulligan did not use a stunt double for his dying death scene.

The moment of Cassie’s death is a terrible blow to the audience – leveled the film’s opening crowd at Sundance – seeing a heroine whose courage is tested and never gives in, until a fragile handcuff gives Al the space to dominate her.

It was a brutal shooting sequence: a slow shot, pushing Cassie floundering under a pillow while her nurse’s pantyhose shook wildly in protest, her head covered with a pillow.

“My father-in-law is a retired police officer, so I asked him how long it would take to suffocate someone,” said Fennell. “We clock. He said about two and a half minutes. It is completely unforgiving. But I really believe strongly that if you are going to show violence, you need … I think in fact the worst thing you can do is to treat it lightly. So it’s shocking, but it shouldn’t be cool. “

In a movie full of dazzling pop tracks and video game synthesizers, the stifling sequence is completely silent – and even more horrible for that. While the scene was being marked and blocked by a stunt crew, Mulligan filmed the scene with Lowell, her head under a pillow, compressed by her knee.

“It is difficult to talk about. I remember everyone on the monitor. It was happening in real time and it’s also a maneuver and it’s dangerous, [so] obviously, if something goes wrong, it’s hard to know, ”said Fennell. “There was a bit of a hairy moment, but luckily everything was fine. When it was happening, when we were watching, everything was silent. “

Mulligan said the timing was “the most honest thing. We had to tell the truth about this situation and it had to be accurate. ”More difficult than the actual footage, she said, was the subsequent voice dubbing in post-production (called ADR, automatic dialogue replacement).

“Somehow, it was worse to do the ADR for this … I had to bring three different pillows to the ADR cabin and I kind of had to recreate the noises. It wasn’t fun, ”said Mulligan.

So, Cassie was doomed when Nina was raped?

There is a question hanging over “Promising young woman”. Does Cassie have any desire to live a different life – the life she could have led if Nina hadn’t been raped? For a moment with Ryan, happiness seems possible. A look at the video that proves Ryan’s presence in Nina’s rape ends this.

Fennell put it this way: “Look at these two paths in front of this promising young woman. One of them is just jumping through the daisies and the delicious and beautiful candy land. And one is tough, lonely and dark. Who chooses the difficult path? It is a horrible road to choose. “

She continued, “It’s not funny how scary a character becomes – especially a woman – when they say, ‘I’m actually right. And so I will continue. Even when everyone is bored, and even when everyone is furious, I will continue. ‘”

But along the way, Fennell said, Cassie was actively choosing to avenge Nina – it wasn’t some sort of orchestrated fate from above. “It was 10 years of slow burning – of tiny self-mutilation decisions, of hardening. To open a wound, and it grows, and then to open it again. “

The film, said Fennell, finds its “right hit in the middle of this process”.

“Promising young woman” is a mix of genres – thrillers, revenge films and comedies like “16 candles” and “Animal House”, when male characters openly contemplate having sex with drunk and unconscious women (also known as … rape ). What happened to Nina gave Cassie a purpose – and what she does for that purpose “many, many male protagonists have been doing for years,” said Fennell. “Men can die very nobly.”

Yes, Cassie has a noble death. And in her mind, when she intricately planned her revenge, she met with Nina – in emoticons, at least.

“She is heroic, even though this heroism is distressing in many ways,” said Fennell. “And it may not be right. But I feel strongly that what she did was the only thing she felt she could do. “