Promising Young Woman – 2020-21
This was a good movie, but it was messed up. The main character was mentally unstable, and went to ridiculously extreme lengths to accomplish her messed up goals. Carey Mulligan, who I remember fondly from the 2009 film, An Education, did a fantastic job in this film, and portrayed a much wider range of emotions and motivations. It was a much more adult role, and she nailed the performance.
So what was so messed up? Well, spoiler alert! Cassie Thomas, played by Mulligan, is a 30-year-old medical school dropout, lives with her parents and works at a coffee shop. Years earlier, her classmate, Al Monroe, raped her best friend and another classmate, Nina Fisher, leading to Nina’s suicide. There was no investigation by the school or consequences from the legal system. Now, Cassie spends her nights feigning drunkenness in clubs and bars, allowing men to take her to their homes, and revealing her sobriety when they try to take advantage of her.
That’s messed up enough, but it gets far worse. When Cassie learns that Al is getting married, she singles out four people who, in her mind, contributed to Nina’s suicide. Madison, played by Alison Brie, was a schoolmate who had dismissed Nina’s rape accusation as a falsehood. Connie Britton plays the college’s Dean, who swept the incident under the rug, allowing Al to walk away from the incident. Al’s lawyer who harassed Nina into dropping the law suit is played by Alfred Molina. And finally Al, himself, played by Chris Lowell, is Cassie’s final victim.
Cassie, who has never gotten over Nina’s death, targets these people for revenge, using severe psychological cruelty as her weapon. These plots were well thought out, and only failed to work in the case of the lawyer, who was so distraught with guilt over the incident that he can no longer practice law. Her revenge falls flat, and she ends up forgiving him. But the other three get their just desserts under Cassie’s machinations. But the end of the film gets even worse, resulting in Cassie’s murder, and Al’s arrest at his own wedding reception.
And then there’s the sub-plot of Cassie re-connecting and falling in love with another old classmate, Ryan, played by Bo Burnham. He seems to be the perfect guy. He is kind and respectful, and genuinely seems to care for Cassie. He actually heals her damaged psyche to such an extent that she abandons her demented plots for revenge… that is, until she is given an old video of Nina’s rape, and she learns that Ryan was one of the drunk and jeering witnesses of the rape.
Other actors who had various but notable roles included Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge as Cassie’s parents, Molly Shannon as Nina’s mother, Laverne Cox as Cassie’s friend Gail, Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and Sam Richardson as potential date rapists that Cassie lures back to their homes, and Steve Monroe as the police investigator who arrests Al for Cassie’s murder. The entire cast did a fantastic job, but I’d like to give a special shout-out to Connie Britton and Christopher Mintz-Plasse for their great performances.
But in truth, the real star of the show was Mulligan. She was so believable and honest in her portrayal of Cassie. The darker moments when she is deceiving unsuspecting men into believing she is so drunk she can barely stand, and the lighter moments when she is falling in love with Ryan, were each handled with skill and depth. Mulligan was nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, though she did not win. The scene in which she watches the video of Nina’s rape was heartbreaking. Just when she thought she was past her grief at last, the wound is reopened, and made worse when she realizes that her boyfriend Ryan had been there, and had done nothing. And that brings up another valid point that the movie made. Perpetrating such a terrible crime is bad, but witnessing one and doing nothing is nearly as despicable.
One thing about the movie that didn’t quite work for me was an odd thing. It was Mulligan’s hair. In her different personas throughout the movie, she changes her hairstyle to suit the situations. Here, she is playing the drunk woman at a seedy nightclub. There, she is getting Madison drunk at a nice restaurant so she can trick her into believing she has been date-raped. And again, there, she is chatting with her friend Gail at the coffee shop. In some scenes, her hair looked just fine, but in others, she looks like she is wearing a wig, especially in the scene with Madison. I don’t know if this was intentional, but something was off, and it drew my attention.
This movie is listed as a dark comedy/thriller, but I don’t get that. In my mind, dark comedy is laughing at a funeral because the corpse died slipping on a banana peel. But I really found no humor in witnessing the emotional distress of a mentally unstable woman. Were her cruel psychological revenge schemes supposed to inspire laughter, a sense of comical irony? There may have been satisfaction on some level as the “bad guys” got their comeuppance, but to me, that’s not the same as dark comedy. Even the scenes where Cassie suddenly revealed her sobriety, and called men out on the fact that they were about to rape a drunk woman, weren’t funny. I found them disturbing on multiple levels, but not funny.