Promising Young Woman Review

Fennell's debut is a candy-colored revenge film that keeps swapping out the genre it is pretending to be, and for two acts that instability is thrilling. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie as a woman running a nightly experiment whose result is always the same, and the opening scene, where a nice guy talks himself step by step into an assault, states the thesis once and never repeats it. The pastels, the nail polish, the string cover of a pop song: everything is arranged to make the audience comfortable right up until it is not.

Mulligan is extraordinary in the register where flirtation and contempt are the same face, and casting familiar, affable actors as the men is the smartest structural choice here. Where it wobbles is the last twenty minutes, when the film swaps its psychological register for a plot mechanism, and the closing gag, cathartic as it plays, hands the story back to the institutions it spent ninety minutes distrusting. A real film with a real argument and a nervy lead performance, weakened by an ending that wants to have both things at once.