Promising Young Woman review: The Golden Globe–nominated movie’s ending is only the beginning of its problems.
SlateThis article contains spoilers for both Promising Young Woman and the HBO series I May Destroy You. That a habit as dangerous as Cassie’s—the writer-director has described it in interviews as a kind of addiction, an analogy Mulligan’s performance powerfully suggests—would consistently end in little more than a successful shaming followed by a safe escape seems unlikely, but that’s one of those givens you have to accept in a stylized thriller like Promising Young Woman. As the critic Mary Beth McAndrews, herself a sexual assault survivor, has written in a thoughtful essay on RogerEbert.com, the movie “doesn’t grapple with the ramifications of Cassie deeming herself the avenging angel without Nina’s explicit consent, and in fact doesn’t even consider the concept of consent outside of the world of sex.” Her compulsively repeated actions on behalf of Nina, who never appears in the film except in the old photos Cassie keeps on her laptop, constitute “a violation of their friendship”—a violation that drags into its wake at least three other women, one of them completely unconnected with the events surrounding Nina’s rape. It’s a sickening bait-and-switch but one that, given the movie’s ambiguous framing of Cassie’s quest for “empowerment,” could have made a kind of grim sense. For over a month now, I’ve been sitting uneasily with the Giving Tree–style message of this movie’s ending, which seems to expect us to find consolation in the fact that, as McAndrews put it, “two women had to die for a man just to get arrested.” The dark irony of that winky-face emoji suggests that Cassie has wreaked a kind of vengeance from beyond the grave—but was it worth it to lose her life for the satisfaction of putting her murderer into the hands of a justice system that will likely exonerate him and sending some saucy texts to a bad ex-boyfriend?
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Promising Young Woman has its flaws but is the #MeToo revenge movie every teenager should watch
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