PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (2020) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Emerald Fennell
Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie,
Jennifer Coolidge, Chris Lowell, Alfred Molina,
Adam Brody, Clancy Brown, Lorna Scott
A feminist psycho thriller starring Carey Mulligan as Cassie Thomas, a med-school dropout working as a barista and exacting some serious revenge for an incident that took place a few years before. It seems there was a party where everybody got drunk and a woman named Nina - Cassie's best friend - was assaulted. Nina never recovered and Cassie quit school, while their male colleagues - the rapists - moved on to successful careers. Cassie figures some payback is due, or at least some justice. There's a suggestion of Jodie Foster's "The Brave One" in this, the difference being that Cassie's not out to kill anybody. She corners her targets and maneuvers them out from behind their lies and excuses to confront their own guilt, acting crazy enough to make them believe something real bad will happen if they don't do that. It's good, formula moviemaking, with the deck stacked in favor of its unhinged protagonist, who's (mostly) sympathetic, and against the men in the story, who are (almost all) sleazy creeps. Lines like "We were kids then" and "We were all drunk" and "Something like this could ruin a young man's life" sound especially lame and pathetic in the wake of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court.
