‘Promising young woman’ review: Carey Mulligan takes revenge

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Cassandra Thomas is an incredible actress. (The same goes for Carey Mulligan, who plays her.) The first time we see her in the tortuous revenge thriller “Promising young woman”, she looks like she’s about to pass out drunk, struggling to establish herself in a club full of revelers, curious and waiting predators.

It takes effort to appear so helpless, to trip over a flight of stairs, one painful step at a time, in the arms of that nice guy who offered to take you home. But the reward is worth it, for us and probably for Cassie, who waits until the right moment – after the nice guy has filled her with more drink and removed her panties – to get attention, totally conscious and sober. “Hey,” she says, in a voice that can freeze blood. “what you’re doing?”

We don’t see what happens to the nice guy, although the angry-looking hash mark Cassie writes in her notebook the next morning is not a good omen. He is the latest in his personal achievement book, men who see her looking martyred in public and launch themselves with concerned smiles, eager to take her home and enjoy it, only to recoil in horror (or worse, indignation) when they realize that was touched. Leaving aside the question of Cassie’s confrontation, it is clear what these men are doing and also what she is doing. Offering itself as a live bait, albeit almost unconscious, it is making the world a little safer for women and a little less comfortable for rapists, an extremely unpleasant shock at a time.

Part of me would be curious to see an alternative version of “Promising Young Woman” that consisted entirely of vignettes from Cassie’s night hunting expeditions. It is their absolute mastery of each confrontation that gives these scenes their sting, although given how widely satirical they are about the rudeness of the beta male – Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s poetic poem about David Foster Wallace is a typical example – he is probably wise let history soon move on to more intriguing businesses. What prompted Cassie to launch her personal vigilante campaign in the first place turned out to be the real subject of this sugary blockbuster film – or perhaps a blockbuster film – by English filmmaker and actor Emerald Fennell.

Before writing and directing this first feature film, Fennell served as a showrunner in the second season of “Killing Eve”, a series whose darkly comic verve, bitter dialogue and concept of hunting the hunters were elegantly reused here, though mostly without any open scenes of violence. Instead, the film vibrates with ambiguity and threat, challenging us to try to locate it. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? (The film’s recent classification as a drama by the Golden Globes, despite its presentation as a comedy, seems to underline the confusion.) Is it an image of cheerful and colorful exploration, a male punishment medley for the #MeToo era? Or is it an emotionally honest and psychologically astute portrait of a woman processing an inconsolable burden of guilt, trauma and pain?

“Promising young woman,” who recently won two awards (for Mulligan’s performance and Fennell’s script) from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, does her best to divide the difference. He seeks to fuse Cassie’s pain and our pleasure, and then cover the cracks with sharp tonal pivots, smooth style blood cells and, above all, Mulligan herself, with her remarkable ability to project rigidity and vulnerability. Since the film is all about duality – the tensions that pull a person’s identity, the malice that can hide under seemingly friendly interactions – this fork is for a time more successful and more fun than you might expect.

The killer soundtrack pulsates with serious covers of songs like “It’s Rainin ‘Men” and “Toxic”, but it also finds room for a sweet and totally ironic Paris Hilton singing. Colors appear like gum in Benjamin Kracun’s carefully composed widescreen images, which sometimes favor slow, creepy zooms of horror movies. Taking advantage of Nancy Steiner’s fantastic outfits, Cassie changes her clothes as often as a spy, which is in some ways exactly what she is. Presenting itself as an almost parody of childlike innocence during the day, with floral print tops and braided ponytails, she turns into a bad girl avenger at night, putting on hoop earrings and smearing lipstick before killing .

Who’s the real Cassie? Her parents (Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown) have no idea and have been worried about her since she dropped out of medical school years ago and essentially put her life on hold. They do not understand why their brilliant and beautiful daughter still lives with them at 30, works in a cafeteria and seems to have no friends besides her supporting boss (Laverne Cox). They definitely have no idea what Cassie does at night, her forgetfulness underscored by a fun and flippant scene of them watching “Hunter’s Night”.

Likewise, in the dark, at first is Ryan (a perfect cast of Bo Burnham, the screenwriter and director of “Eighth Series”), a tall and clumsy charming who stops at breakfast one morning and recognizes Cassie from her college days. medicine. It is a playfully strange meeting; she barely remembers him, and Ryan, now a pediatric surgeon, has a serious case of foot-and-mouth disease. But he is obviously in love with Cassie and eventually melts his stamina with puppy persistence, in scenes that are even more attractive, and slightly disturbing, for his incongruous rom-com sweetness.

Ryan’s reappearance in Cassie’s life pushes her in two equally fascinating directions. The fact that Ryan is the first man in centuries to bypass her natural defenses, to awaken her feelings of affection and desire, rather than contempt, raises the question of whether she would be ready to turn a new page. But her story as former classmates can’t help but bring her back to the past, and specifically to the tragic memory of her best friend, Nina, who is clearly at the center of Cassie’s dark mission.

What happened to Nina is not difficult to discover, although the constant and meticulous development of this backstory produces its own chilling satisfactions. Shifting her focus from random men to clubs, Carrie directs her laser fury at the many people who have failed Nina, women and men. Ranging from unconscious (Connie Britton) to insensitive (Alison Brie) to self-flagellating (Alfred Molina), they unwittingly illuminate a culture of sexual assault that routinely shames accusers and gives defendants the benefit of the doubt. In these fierce calculations, “Promising young woman” plays hard with her empathy and her schadenfreude, as if to suggest that the two reactions, far from being opposite, are in fact closely linked.

Certainly they are for Cassie, a bundle of contradictions practically held together by Mulligan’s change in shape, a meticulously controlled performance, without which the dark and undisciplined pleasures of history could have become incoherent. She pushes this determinedly unstable film as far as it can go, even if it’s not far enough after all. The harsh, multi-tasking ending of “Promising Young Woman” seems audacious and uncertain in itself, while Fennell tries to fuse a laugh of pleasure and a burst of fury, with a lingering residue of anguish. Not everything comes together, although there is an undeniable emotion in seeing it come undone.