Promising Young Woman, Sky Cinema review - Emerald Fennell s brilliant directorial debut theartsdesk.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theartsdesk.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
After losing her best friend in a mysterious tragedy, Cassie (Carey Mulligan) has put her career aspirations on ice. Instead she spends her nights drawing in sexual predators by pretending to be drunk and then dispensing her own form of justice.
by Sophie Monks Kaufman |
Posted
3 hours ago
Promising Young Woman is a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a revenge drama that looks like a romcom. Don’t be fooled by the heightened girly colours or high-gloss production values there is molten fury running through the hot-pink veins of Emerald Fennell’s debut feature and, deeper down, grief for women who have lost so much and stand to lose even more. The antagonist here is not so much a single character, as it is broad social attitudes towards sexual violence against women. Fennell’s greatest move is to mount genre storytelling atop sincere emotional undercurrents which build to a crashing wave by the finale.
Sun 14 Mar 2021 04.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 24 Mar 2021 09.39 EDT Rachel Pronger
writes about film, visual art and cultural history. She is also a programmer and curator, and cofounder of the feminist film collective Invisible Women. Born in Bradford, she is currently based in Berlin
It’s that queasy part of the night. We’re in a sleazy bar, the kind with mirrored walls and a sticky floor. A drunk woman sprawls on a banquette, propped up, barely able to lift her head. She’s smartly dressed, alone, abandoned. A group of men survey her with distaste. “They put themselves in danger, women like that. You’d think they’d learn by that age, right?”
CST
Focus Features presents a film written and directed by Emerald Fennell. Rated R (for strong violence including sexual assault, language throughout, some sexual material and drug use). Running time: 113 minutes. Available Friday on demand. Not that Cassie never goes out. One night a week, she hits the town by herself and appears to get so hammered she nearly blacks out. Inevitably, some random, sleazy guy on the prowl will make the moves on Cassie and take her back to his place and try to have sex with her, even though he believes her to be intoxicated and she’s telling the guy to stop, please stop.