Promising Young Woman marries dark comedy with #MeToo revenge fantasy spurred by campus rape culture
ABCRevenge is a dish served bold in Promising Young Woman, an ambitious, erratic dark comedy starring Carey Mulligan as a man-baiting loner haunted by the college sexual assault of her best friend. It's a movie directly, unapologetically ripped from the headlines around campus rape from a few years ago, in which "promising" — read: affluent, white — young men were routinely excused from assault charges, or shown extreme leniency, and where slut shaming was a common refrain that derailed the lives of the victims. As the dripping, pink-blood typeface of the title stamped across the screen soon attests, Promising Young Woman is a movie about vengeance, in which Cassie's apparently random hook-ups are part of a calculated pattern — payback for the unpunished assault that eventually led to her best friend's death. Thus the childhood sound of the Spice Girls' 2 Become 1 becomes an overture to doom on a taxi radio, Paris Hilton's Stars Are Blind mischievously undermines a saccharine rom-com montage, and — in the film's most piercing sonic moment — a spiky, orchestral version of Toxic shadows Cassie while she approaches a bucks party deep in the woods, as though Bernard Herrmann and Britney Spears were communing to summon the angry spirits of the 2000s.
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Carey Mulligan on Promising Young Woman: 'Expectations of beauty and perfection on screen has gotten out of control'
Firstpost
Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell: ‘The experience of so many victims is that everyone wants you to let it go’
The Independent
Promising Young Woman has its flaws but is the #MeToo revenge movie every teenager should watch
The Independent
Promising Young Woman review: Carey Mulligan picks at the scabs of female trauma
The Independent
Director Emerald Fennell, Actor Carey Mulligan On 'Promising Young Woman'
NPR
Review: Carey Mulligan mesmerizes in ‘Promising Young Woman’
The Independent
Review: Carey Mulligan mesmerizes in ‘Promising Young Woman’
Associated Press
Carey Mulligan on "Promising Young Woman," a feminist revenge story for the ages
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