Promising young woman

It is very rare to discover a thriller of disconcerting originality and taking the predefined bases of a genre to contort them and deliver at the same time the portrait of a woman as beautiful as she is determined to right the wrongs of her past. Indeed, nothing in Cassandra Thomas' (Carey Mulligan) life is what it seems: she is very smart, very cunning and leads a secret double life at night. Yet an unexpected encounter is about to give Cassandra a chance to right the wrongs of the past.

Promising young woman perfectly mixes the revenge movie with a good dose of humor and above all the presence of actress Carey Mulligan in a role against employs in which she simply imposes herself as one of the best current actresses. After multiple roles in excellent films such as An Education (2009), Drive (2011), The Great Gatsby (2013), The Suffragettes (2015), she becomes here a real killer who settles her accounts with an undeniable talent for manipulation by playing on deceptive appearances.

From the introductory scene in which we discover the character of Cassandra who seems drunk and stranded on a bench of a bar. A man believing her to be defenseless and really drunk then tries to take her home but he will really fall into a trap and realize that like a spider, Cassandra has woven her web and is taking revenge on the men who attacked her in her past. Completely breaking her innocent image, Carey Mulligan delivers the portrait of a woman who seems to have a plan to take revenge on several men. Her character, destined for a brilliant career in medicine, had to drop out of school for a cause that we learn about during the film and that makes us take part in her punitive cruise.

While most of the current films distill in their trailer the strongest scenes, Promising Young Woman plays against the current and shows us that Emerald Fennell, a recognized actress, has a real gift for directing and especially for writing scripts with multiple twists. Her film is perfectly topical in the Hollywood world in which women finally speak out to put fat producers in their place and reveal a backstage scenery that is not very flattering in the Hollywood world.

In the same way, Emerald Fennell perfectly understood the importance of taking care of a film not only by a superb image, a scenario of an indisputable meticulousness and a remarkable interpretation but also by a dynamic music which reinforces all the aestheticism of this remarkable film. For example, the covers of "It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls and Toxic by Britney Spears perfectly illustrate this desire to revisit and reinterpret timeless classics in the same way that this film revisits the thriller and the film noir.

The Oscar for Best Original Screenplay won on April 25th is well deserved and we would have liked Carey Mulligan to win an Oscar as well, as her performance is unforgettable and makes Promising Young Woman a classic in the making, with such an intelligent ending that we are left speechless with only the desire to applaud and see this film again.

Promising Young Woman
Written and directed by Emerald Fennell
Produced by Margot Robbie, Josey McNamara, Tom Ackerley, Ben Browning, Ashley Fox, Emerald Fennell
Starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Connie Britton
Music by Anthony Willis
Cinematography : Benjamin Kra?un
Edited by Frédéric Thoraval
Production companies : FilmNation Entertainment, LuckyChap Entertainment
Distributed by Focus Features (USA), Universal Pictures International France (France)
Release date : January 25, 2020 (Sundance), December 25, 2020 (United States), May 26, 2021 (France)
Running time : 113 minutes

Seen on December 2, 2020 (press screener)
Reviewed on June 03, 2021

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