Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020) (Patreon)

A curiosity. If you consider Promising Young Woman in the context of the broadly commercial revenge-thriller, comparing it to something like Hard Candy, it may seem audacious. It certainly has its unexpected twists and turns, but more significantly, it seems to treat the issue of trauma with more gravity than it necessarily has to. On the other hand, looked at as a "serious" film, PYW is obviously pretty trashy, but doesn't evince the knowing irony one expects from so-called "artsploitation."

As is so often the case, the problem could be TV. This is the first film by Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, and for one thing, lead character Cassie (Carey Mulligan) exhibits a charismatic, hair-trigger theatricality -- zero to maniac in 10 seconds -- reminiscent of that show's psychopath assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Characters like this may fun because they are unpredictable, but you really can't dig into them too much. Their backstories tend to be schematic, reverse-engineered affairs, designed to generate the desired, necessary psychotic outcomes, and they are seldom all that convincing.

In this instance, we see Cassie orchestrate date-rape scenarios, pretending to be drunk so that guys in bars will take her home and try to assault her. She then shocks them with her instantaneous lucidity. The logical fallacy here -- that the surprised men could just as easily overpower her as let her go -- is retroactively explained away by the remainder of the film. Cassie is, essentially, "already dead." She never got over the date-rape and subsequent suicide of her best friend at a party back in med school, and she blames herself for not having been there. So her shift into "avenging angel" mode, revisiting all those responsible for her friend's demise, is not so much righteous payback as systematic death march.

Prestige TV loves pat, clever structures, the sort of Shakespearean ironies and reversals that seem deft and literary precisely because they have been road-tested across centuries. In the best circumstances, these screenwriterly tours de force stand out because, in the context of series television, they serve as striking epiphanies about characters we have been getting to know for quite some time. (A shock-moment such as Walt letting Jane die in Breaking Bad would have just been a glib heel-turn if it happened in a two-hour movie.) Promising Young Woman seems like it has a horrible, even anti-feminist twist ending, but it's really dumber than that. Cassie has been committing a form of suicide-by-proxy out of survivor's guilt, and that's a nifty idea, but it takes groundwork. You can't just pull it out of your ass in the eleventh hour.