Whew, that ending to "Promising Young Woman" is a punch to the gut
🚨 This newsletter contains spoilers for Promising Young Woman. And as a Content Warning, this newsletter does discuss sexual assault and violence against women. 🚨
I really loved Promising Young Woman. It is dark as FUCK. It’s also brilliantly cast and brilliantly acted. And it has an ending I won’t be able to stop thinking about for weeks.
Seriously, stop reading and watch the movie! Spoilers to follow.
The film follows Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a med school dropout who works at a coffee shop and lives with her parents. Many years before, Cassie’s best friend Nina was raped while drunk at a med school party; the school refused to do anything about it and her rapist was never punished, and while it’s never explicitly stated, it’s implied that Nina died by suicide. Cassie now spends her weekends going to clubs, pretending to be extremely drunk, and when a “good samaritan” brings her back to his place to take advantage of her, she reveals the ruse and scares the hell out of them.
And if that’s not dark enough for you, Cassie then finds out that Nina’s rapist is back in town, and she decides to get revenge one every person she blames for Nina’s death.
Mulligan really sinks her teeth into this role, and she doesn’t shy away from any of Cassie’s flaws or dark sides, but she’s not afraid to show her vulnerability, either. And writer/director Emerald Fennell did a brilliant thing casting all of the men in this movie — she purposely cast actors that have such a positive image, that so many people like and have crushes on, and then has them play the monsters. It’s not fun seeing Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Sam Richardson, Max Greenfield, and Chris Lowell in this light, but it perfectly shines the light on how we so quickly look for reasons to excuse bad behaviour from men. And casting Bo Burnham — SWEET BO BURNHAM — as the romantic interest, making Cassie (and us!) fall for him, and then reveal he not only witnessed Nina’s rape but recorded it and shared the video, is exactly the gut punch Fennell clearly wants.
But of course, this isn’t a movie that could just end with Cassie getting revenge and coming out victorious against her foes. When she finally goes to the rapist’s bachelor party, posing as a stripper, she gets him alone in a room, handcuffs him to the bed, and intends to carve Nina’s name into him. But he gets free and ultimately smothers her with a pillow, in a scene that goes on far past the point where you think “oh, she’s just pretending, she’s just holding her breath, she’s just tricking him.” No, Cassie dies, and the rapist and his friend dispose of her body.
However, Cassie still had one last move, because before she went to the bachelor party, she told a lawyer about where she was going and what she was going to do, and that if she goes missing, that’s where she probably ended up. Oh, and she gives him the video of Nina as well. So the rapist gets arrested at his wedding and it’s implied that soon everyone involved will get their comeuppance, regardless of whether Cassie was alive to see it or not.
Like I said, dark as fuck. But a great script manages to come up with an ending that feels both surprising and inevitable, and Fennell really stuck the landing here.
Promising Young Woman is a movie that sticks with you, and I hope that a ton of people watch it.
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That’s all for me today, gorgeous! Talk to you tomorrow.
Love,
Kat
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