Promising Young Woman (2020)
Directed by Emerald Fennell
A young woman, traumatized by a tragic event in her past, seeks out vengeance against those who crossed her path.
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38 films that influenced Promising Young Woman
What critics say influenced Promising Young Woman
If you watch the trailer for Promising Young Woman , the feature directorial debut of The Crown actress and Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, you’ll probably think you’re about to see a glossy proto-feminist tale of revenge, something akin to a 21st-century Ms .45 or a post-Weinstein Veronica Mars .
I’m thinking, specifically, of Abel Ferrara’s righteously furious Ms .45…
Any vicarious thrill from seeing these films’ antagonists hunted down by avenging angels (typically, but not always, the victims of rape) in work as varied in style and quality as The Last House on the Left (1972), Ms .45…
Fennell’s inspirations are more macabre, utilizing a snippet of The Night of the Hunter (1955) as a prelude to Cassandra’s eventual climax.
Back at work the next day, Cassie – who lives with her clueless parents (Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown, whose home décor is stuck in the ‘70s as they ironically watch The Night of the Hunter on TV) – serves a customer Ryan (Bo Burnham).
They definitely have no idea what Cassie gets up to in the evenings, their obliviousness underscored by a glibly amusing shot of them watching “The Night of the Hunter.”
In Charles Laughton’s, The Night of the Hunter, the film’s misogynistic serial killer protagonist, Rev. Harry Powell, says, “Not that you mind the killings.
There was a similar dynamic in the form of David Slade’s “Hard Candy” (2005), featuring a so-young Elliot Page, in which sins are practiced upon the sinner with cold rebuke, but Fennell’s less interested in the protracted application of the laser than in keen appreciation of the delicate art of the bazooka.
It's not a particularly novel idea (beyond switching the gender of the vigilante, although that has been done before -- notably 2005's "Hard Candy") and it makes one wonder why she never went after the guilty before now rather than racking up an impressive list of strangers' names that she keeps in her "I humiliated" notebook compilation.
A movie thriller for the #MeToo movement writ large, “Promising Young Woman” is like a bit of stale “Hard Candy,” the 2005 film also premised around vengeance against a sexual predator that features a standout leading performance.
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.
As dark revenge fantasies go, this is no “Hard Candy” or “Thoroughbreds.”
In 1988, The Accused came along, bringing the legal struggles of survivors to the forefront of the narrative, making the rape-revenge films that came before it culturally obsolete.
The cheaply constructed catharsis born from masculine perspectives and their attempts to navigate a woman’s emotional experiences in response to rape and sexual assault ranges from well intentioned exploitation such as I Spit on Your Grave (aka Day of the Woman) or any number of high-profile dramatic representations in morbid, if effective melodramas ( The Accused ; Death and the Maiden , Elle , etc.).
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Fennell’s film revels in a winking, sleazy glamour that for me recalled those thrillers of the 1980s and ’90s that capitalized on the sexual and professional anxieties of their time, like Disclosure , or Fatal Attraction .
Emerald Fennell's razor-sharp feature writing and directing debut could do for sexual assault what Fatal Attraction did with cheating: scare men into thinking twice.
There’s plenty of Hollywood precedent for movies about vengeful women, from Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill franchise, but those stories have traditionally been told by men.
The media coverage of 16-year-old Amy Fisher’s supposed “affair” with a man 40 years her senior (and the resulting shooting of his wife) and the release of Katt Shea’s Poison Ivy in 1992 gave rise to images of vulnerable young women as master manipulators, taking advantage of grown men who might otherwise have been seen as predators.
Think of Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) from “Death Wish” (1974), except Cassie purposely makes herself an easy target in Ohio watering holes, not a New York City subway car.
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Any vicarious thrill from seeing these films’ antagonists hunted down by avenging angels (typically, but not always, the victims of rape) in work as varied in style and quality as The Last House on the Left (1972), Ms .45…
If films like 1998’s Very Bad Things indulged in toxic masculinity then Fennell’s film takes glee in serving the male ego, and its female enablers, a much-needed comeuppance.