Unfulfilled by Promising Young Woman
Promising Young Woman, Focus Features (2020).
By R. J. F.
Almost every woman has been in that situation. That situation where you’ve had some drinks and a man tries to take advantage of you and her body because he knows that your senses are dulled. I, myself, have been in a handful of these situations, but I was lucky to be able to escape before anything escalated to the point of no return. I had a friend that was a rape survivor, but she lost her life to depression, and the rape she suffered contributed to her early death. According to Rainn.org, 1 in 6 American woman will either be raped or encounter an attempted rape in her lifetime. So, if you lined up six women that you know, it’s possible that one of them has been victimized in this way. Of men that go on trial for rape or attempted rape, less than 1% will be convicted and serve jail time, according to this article by The Washington Post. When you look at the cold facts and statistics about rape, it’s sickening.
The movie, Promising Young Woman, is centered around the story of a woman, Cassie, that is avenging the rape of her best friend, Nina. In the film, it’s implied that Nina killed herself as a result of her rape, which was actually a gang rape at a college party many years ago. When the audience first meets Cassie, she is pretending to be incredibly drunk at a bar and a nice guy offers to give her a ride home. The ride home turns into a drink at his apartment, which almost increases to a nonconsensual sexual encounter, and then turns into Cassie revealing that she is not, in fact, drunk. At first, I thought that she was killing all these dudes, but in another fake drunk incident, the audience learns that she’s just scaring them in the hopes that they’ll rethink their predatory ways.
Carey Mulligan, who plays Cassie, does a phenomenal job in the role. She’s almost emotionless in most of her scenes; like the weight of what happened to her friend has drained her of her own life. In the scenes where she is emotional, which are few and far between, she either radiates with joy, or crumbles into tears. I think Mulligan is an amazing actress, and casting her in this movie was an awesome choice. It’s every woman’s fantasy to exact revenge on people like this, and Mulligan gets to live out that dream through Cassie. When I say “people like this”, I mean both men and women because there are some women in this film who were complicit in the aftermath of the gang rape of Nina. Mulligan’s “too little, too late” attitude when dealing with these horrid characters is impressive because their tears and distress don’t phase her.
Although the movie is mostly great, I didn’t like how they chose to have Cassie murdered by Nina’s main assailant, Al. I don’t know what this death is trying to teach the audience. While watching, I wanted Al to be harmed or killed by Cassie for what he had done to Nina. I wanted Cassie to have her vengeance for Nina, her poetic, vigilante justice for the best friend that was assaulted. Sadly, this wasn’t the case because Al was able to overpower Cassie, suffocating her under a pillow and using his body weight to pin her down. I was hoping that Cassie would fake her suffocation, that when Al thought the struggle was over, she would sit up and finish his pathetic life. I think any woman that watched this movie wishes that Al would’ve been maimed or killed; it seems unfair that Cassie, the twisted heroine, was murdered. It made me feel angry at the film makers because I felt like they were trying to say that women will always lose against a man’s physical strength.
What I did like is that they didn’t show the rape scene. Cassie get’s ahold of a video of the gang rape, but only some audio of it can be heard as we watch Cassie watching the footage, tears rolling down her cheeks. One reason why I think it was a good decision to not show that footage is that it’s too easy, obvious, and common to see women and their naked bodies getting violated on film. It’s all too often that I’m watching some movie, especially horror movies, and the women are always undressed, or being probed, or being forced upon. It’s like society has an unhealthy obsession with punishing women and their bodies by sexually exploiting and violating us on film. So, to have a movie whose origin story stems from a brutal rape and not watch some naked actress being accosted, was a relief. I mean, think about it, how many shows and movies have you seen where women are brutalized in a sexual way versus men? Not many, I’m guessing. These scenes are constantly being shoved down our throats, so it was a nice change to not have to witness it.
Two is that, by not showing the rape, it leaves our fucked up imaginations to do the work. Anything we can think of, which, for some, might be worse than what the director could’ve shot, can come to mind. This makes it more sinister because the audience can only imagine what happened to Nina. Using Mulligan’s emotions as Cassie when she watches the video, along with the audio, is less exploitative and more uncomfortable as we, the audience, need to come up with what we think is happening. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Accused, starring Jodie Foster, which was based on a true story, you can fill in the blanks of a gang rape.
When Promising Young Woman was over, I didn’t feel fulfilled. Yes, Cassie did get the ultimate, posthumous revenge on everyone that either partook in the rape, the aftermath of the rape, and Cassie’s own murder, but it wasn’t good enough. I wanted her to be there, smirking in the background as all of the assholes were rounded up by the police. I wanted to hear her dry, emotionless voice telling them that it was all for Nina, but I, along with anyone rooting for Cassie, was not afforded that.
I think about the Brock Turner case, who was caught mid-rape and given a light sentence because he was a promising young man that made a mistake. I think about other rape cases where the female victims were demonized for drinking too much, being promiscuous, wearing suggestive outfits, or any other excuses that could be used to make people believe that they “had it coming” or were “asking for it” and realize that maybe this was the point of the ending. Going back to the statistics presented earlier, it would make sense that Cassie didn’t get to live long enough to see her end game play out, just like all those young girls and women out there who don’t get the justice they deserve because of our broken society, with its hatred and misogyny aimed at girls and women; it finds us on the losing end more times than can be counted. On the whole, Promising Young Woman made me feel more defeated than empowered, no matter how brilliant the writing, acting, and directing.
