We Are All Promising Young Women
The candy-coated horror-show that mirrors life for modern women
Credit: Focus Features
I remember watching this film when it first came out. I couldn’t get it off mind mind for weeks. I re-watched it recently, and it hit harder now that I have left university.
If Emerald Fennell’s beautifully dark film wasn’t enough of a shocker, it might surprise you to know she filmed it in just 23 days and that it is her directorial debut. The screenplay is a candy-coated horror-show of the realities for women today, and there is a lot to digest from it.
In short, this story is centred around Cassandra Thomas’s revenge for her best friend, Nina, who was sexually assaulted in college. Revenge is a strong word, mostly synonymous with the bloodiness of Kill Bill and other female revenge stories that border on the ‘hysteria’ trope. Yet Fennell’s play on this trope is elegantly cunning. Well, if the opening shots are not enough to disturb you then watch on, dear viewer, for your stomach will be churned by the end. We open on slow-motion, close-ups of men’s crotches as they dance — disturbing? Yes. Why? Because we are not used to men being subjects of such shots; if the men were replaced with women, we wouldn’t bat an eyelid. For once, it is not a man’s eyes through which we watch a film. These men are then seen at the bar, convincing their ‘nice-guy’ friend to go and check if the drunken Cassie is okay. When he tries to take advantage of her back at his place, not long after, it shocks him to learn that she is not drunk at all. She questions why he doesn’t want to make advances now that she is fully conscious. And here lies the crux of the film: entitlement.
It is disturbing to see every-day occurrences and hear every-day phrases played out in irony in front of us. Let’s use the title as an example. We’ve all heard “oh, but he’s such a promising young man” used in the defence of a sexual predator at a college. We all know that college councils are quick to defend their star players and academics because they are so promising, and it would be such a shame to ruin their careers, wouldn’t it? We never hear how a promising young woman had her future taken away from her when she was assaulted. Fennell wrote a scene in which this plays out in front of us. Cassie goes to see Dean Walker to enact revenge, but Dean Walker does not remember Nina, and talks of how she couldn’t possibly ruin a young man’s life because…what if it wasn’t true? Cassie then lets on that she has dropped the Dean’s daughter off at a dorm full of drunk men, to which the Dean is frightened and gets angry. This brings Cassie to state that “it feels different when it’s someone you love”, a profound line, but an unfortunately common ploy. Here, Fennell is alluding to the fact that it shouldn’t take having a daughter, or wife, or sister to be a decent man. It is human decency, and human respect. Why must we beg for decency? I highly recommend The Hunting Ground (2015), a documentary on these college sexual assault cover-ups.
Credit: Focus Features
Perhaps the most disturbing part of all is the part in which a mirror is held up in front of us: Fennell exposes bystanders. The people who know what’s going on, the people who don’t want to believe it’s going on — but mainly, the people who were ‘just kids’. This line is used repeatedly in the defence of the video of sexual assault on Nina, and the people who watched it happen and did nothing but laugh. Finally, Cassie gets frustrated with it. In the scene of her demise, Cassie is visibly annoyed at the perpetrator saying he was just a kid when it happened. By kid, he means college-aged. Age is not an excuse, Nina was ‘just a kid’ too, but that is never used in her offence. Cassie exposes the man she’s seeing, Ryan (played by the familiar face of Bo Burnham — casting is key!). He was there when the assault took place, and he watched it happen. Cassie is devastated by this, and points out that it is not enough to not assualt people; not assaulting people does not make you good. What makes you good is not standing by, and not turning a blind eye to it happening.
Credit: Focus Features
In Cassie’s final scene, we are hit hard with another great line of dialogue. Al, the perpetrator, states to Cassie that it is every man’s worst nightmare to be accused of something like this, to which Cassie asks:
“Can you guess what every woman’s worst nightmare is?”
Ouch. It’s true, and finally, it has been said. The final scene is not what viewers want. Cassie doesn’t save the day. We don’t get justice for Nina in the brutal way that we want. Cassie is murdered by Al, suffocated in a final showdown that portrays the realistic notion that she wasn’t strong enough to fight him off, and emphasises the metaphor that to entitled men like Al, women are disposable; he then burns her corpse. Reality bites. Cassie is no superhero, she hasn’t got superhuman strength, and this isn’t a fairytale.
As bleak as this is, Cassie does get a final bit of revenge when Al gets arrested at his wedding, with a scheduled text from Cassie telling him such. It just doesn’t feel enough.
Promising Young Woman is both painful and pretty. It has a sting. Things that are normal and accepted are played out in front of us with only one verdict — something needs to change. We are capable of making these changes, if we speak up for one another, and refuse to stand idle while ‘boys are boys’.