Marcos Siega
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The film's combination of shocks and laughs works to an extent, in the vein of Heathers and Mean Girls.
The director, Marcos Siega, is trying for an arch, sardonic tone of the sort that sustained classically mordant accounts of teen perfidy such as "Heathers" or "Cruel Intentions," but it's really beyond his grasp, and sophisticated dialogue is beyond the grasp of screenwriter Skander Halim.
Like some sketch-comedy Frankenstein monster made from the cutting-room entrails of "Clueless," "The Opposite of Sex," "To Die For," "Election" and "Heathers," the puerile social satire "Pretty Persuasion" is stinging only insomuch as its unsophisticated wit and overwhelming smugness are painful to sit through.
Probably the three finest models of the genre, Heathers (1989), Clueless (1995) and Election (1999) -- not to mention last year's Mean Girls , which was a fairly entertaining distillation of its predecessors -- serve as examples to help explain what the new film Pretty Persuasion does wrong.
She is alone with only the delicate alliances of high school and whatever sense of self-worth she can muster, which at first seems to be plenty as she comes across like a younger version of Linda Fiorentino's character in 1994's "The Last Seduction."
Promising Young Woman (2020)
Directed by Emerald Fennell
influenced by Pretty Persuasion (2005)
Themes
With The Crush (1993), Election (1999), and all the Poison Ivy sequels and knockoffs like Hard Candy (2005) and Pretty Persuasion (2005), media transformed abuse victims into cunning perpetrators of violence in their own right.