Trauma’s aftershocks, the art of sacrifice, and ‘Promising Young Woman’

This review contains major spoilers for Promising Young Woman.

Sexual assault squeezes you out. Like bloodletting. Your body, your soul, your mind, your will to live ⏤ cracked shells of a once-vivavious human being ⏤ crumble down around you. And you may not even realize it’s happening until it’s too late. Or you perhaps think yourself deserving of devastation. When the last few precariously dangling structures collapse, and the dust finally settles, your tortured ghost is fated to haunt the earth. Promising Young Woman is such a spectral, a vengeful one, and its head-spinning finale left me both bereft and reconsidering what my own assault had done to me.

I was abused when I was six years old. Someone I should have trusted betrayed me, forcing his body onto mine, coercing me to believe it was normal. We’d been playing pretend ⏤ him an army recruit, me his “nurse” ⏤ and before I knew it, he’d tossed my meager frame onto the sofa and took off his pants. I was six. I don’t know how it happened, but I later accused my own father of the assault. I’d spend countless afternoons going to a therapist who instructed me to retell the event over and over and over again using cloth dolls. My false accusation is branded on my skin as much as the asault itself; I was never able to apologize to my father or even ask him how it hurt him (he died over five years ago). So, I just tucked my trauma away, and 25 years later, I confronted it head-on.

I never expected it to, but Promising Young Woman split my past open like taking a bowling ball to a walnut. Emerald Fennell’s directorial debut leaps beyond standard rape/revenge boundaries and lurches into something different altogether ⏤ a savagely twisty beast that’s far more about all-consuming grief (as critic Candice Frederick so thoughtfully explores), anvil-sized guilt, and, for me, the never-ending ripples that affect every part of a sexual assault survivor’s life, including any ability to have healthy relationships ⏤ platonic, romantic, or otherwise. When my psychological and emotional barriers tore apart, leaving me feeling raw and vulneralbe in a way I haven’t felt in a long time, I knew my assault had forged very deep scars. “I was assaulted,” I confessed in my heart of hearts. I said those words aloud and wrote them down many times the last three years, and I have yet to really mine the breadth of its impact. After my first, second, and third viewing, the long-harbored truth sprang forth like a ravenous lion pouncing on their prey: intimacy has always been suffocating and agonizing.

For all its flashy pastels, gooey pop soundtrack, and sticky rom-com center, Promising Young Woman stabs the jugular with its quiet, claustrophobic moments ⏤ carefullly nestled in both outward and inward confrontation about said intimacy and how one’s deterioriation is slow, methodical, and always in plain sight. Fennell, most known as Killing Eve season two showrunner and Camilla on Netflix’s The Crown, roots the modern tragedy in trauma’s destructive aftershocks, so devastating no one could possibly get out alive, and dresses the ruin up with rich, deceptively-electrifying cinema.

Cassie (Carey Mulligan) has never recovered from the rape and suicide of her best friend Nina Fisher. They grew up together, went on countless playdates, and attended medical school together. When tragedy struck, and it struck like a den of vipers, Cassie remained by Nina’s side; they both dropped out, left to pick up the pieces and salvage whatever they could of their lives ⏤ but Nina soon paid a heavy price. For Cassie’s part, grief and guilt consume her now, and she is nothing more than a corpse of her former self, dragging Nina’s memory along like a ball and chain. She’s a prisoner, thinking herself completely undeserving of any kind of life without Nina in it.

By-day, Cassie is an apathetic barista, churning lattes or reading books like “Careful How You Go,” a reference to Fennell’s short film (of the same name), and by-night, she’s a femme fatale who acts completely sloshed at nightclubs to lure self-lauded “nice guys” into her web. She doesn’t kill them but rather forces them to confront their socially-learned predatory behavior, resulting in some of the film’s most incisive commentary about rape culture and what it actually means to be a nice guy. I will always live for seeing rapists slaughtered onscreen ⏤ Natalia Leite’s M.F.A. and Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge are perfectly cathartic bloodbaths that I will watch until the day I die ⏤ yet Promising Young Woman posits the clashing of accountability and direct consequence carries far more significance than simply offing abusers.

Within this much larger conversation, Promising Young Woman peels back the glossy layers to reveal an irreparably damaged woman whose pain leaves scratch marks on everyone she comes into contact with. Cassie’s adoring parents Stanley (Clancy Brown) and Susan (Jennifer Coolidge) begin to show emotional cracks, particularly when Cassie forgets her own 30th birthday. “I don’t know what happened here,” Susan caves into a burst of tears. These brief snapshots piece together one of the film’s underlying themes: trauma is far reaching, more than anyone might ever realize or be willing to admit.

Amidst her double life, Cassie crosses paths with former med school classmate Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham), and the two strike up a quick and severe infatuation. Ryan charms his way into her life; he’s funny, dashing, and super tall, as they joke about on one of their first dates ⏤ and by all accounts, he appears to actually be a nice guy. Early on, the two dish about their lives, and the conversation veers into reminiscing about med school and other classmates ⏤ including Madison McPhee (Alison Brie) and known rapist Al Monroe (Chris Lowell). Al’s name drops out of the air like an atmoic bomb, blasting nuclear fallout all across Cassie. It’s a subtle, otherwise inconsequential moment in mundane conversation, yet it’s firmly the catalyst that propels Cassie on a new kind of pursuit.

Feeling the trauma coursing through her veins anew, she begins tracking down everyone in her past who either enabled Al to rape Nina or completely turned a blind eye. She confronts Madison (a slult-shamer who called Nina’s accusations as “crying wolf”), Forest University’s Dean Walker (who dismissed it all as “a classic he said/she said situation”), and even the lawyer on the case (Alfread Molina), who “bullied and harassed” Nina until she dropped the lawsuit. Each confrontation is as revelatory as the next, winding through continued denial, complicity, and dishonorable tactics to cut to the core of it: we as a society are simply not doing enough. We’ve shied away from having these necessary conversations for far too long, but if #MeToo has taught us anything, it’s never too late to hold someone (probably a man) accountabe for their behavior.

When Cassie finds herself back on the doorstep of Mrs. Fisher (Molly Shannon), Promising Young Woman dishs up another hard-to-swallow pill: you can’t fix the past. Cassie however believes that she can somehow rectify what happened to Nina, and in effect, herself. Mrs. Fisher is quick to reprimand her, though: “Oh, come on. You can’t. Don’t be a child, Cassie.” Her words cut like a thousand daggers ⏤ and in that moment, Cassie knows she must finally let the past rest and move on.

And she does move on ⏤ for a minute.

Stricken with guilt, Madison comes forward with a video tape of Nina’s rape. “So much stuff happened back then, like all the time. You know what it was like. It was just one blackout after the next. I… hoped I’d imagined it,” she confesses, before rummaging in her purse for an old cell phone. “I don’t know how we all could have watched it… and thought it was funny.” Cassie braces herself for the worst (and what could be worse than watching your best friend’s rape), and no one, not even she, could have anticipated what happened next: Ryan’s face pops onto the screen. Ryan is the kind of “nice guy” that goes along with it, even if he doesn’t actually rape anyone, chalking it up to being young, dumb, and drunk kids. He’s “the poor bystander,” as Cassie puts it when she confronts him.

It’s the left-hook punch that sends the film careening to its deadly, shocking finale. Promising Young Woman builds and builds and builds as one might expect in rape/revenge films, culminating in the confrontation we’ve all been waiting for: that of Nina’s rapist. Al Monroe is boyishly handsome with a sweet demeanor, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing type. Dolled up as a naughty nurse, Cassie crashes Al’s bachelor’s party, descending upon the secluded cabin packed full of frat bros. “I can’t get paid unless I go upstairs with you,” Cassie whispers into Al’s ear, coaxing him to go upstairs with her after a hearty round of roofied shots. She playfully handcuffs Al to the bed and so begins Cassie’s calcuated interogation. All she really wants is a confession and for him to finally own up to what he did.

Al never once confesses, aknowledges, or even understands why his actions were so catastrophic, of course. Instead, he crumbles into a pool of crocodile tears. “Aw, don’t cry,” taunts Cassie. “Really, don’t fucking cry.” She then launches into a heartfelt monologue about who Nina really was in this life, someone “fully formed” since birth. “Nina was extraorindary, so smart, weirdly smart… and funny. Like a grownup is funny. Kind of shrewd. I was just in awe of her. I couldn’t believe she wanted to be my friend.”

You quickly realize Cassie, perhaps, is too far gone, so totally consumed by tragedy, guilt, grief, and rage. There’s no way she could move on, even if she wanted to. And even still, what happens next is no less horrifying. As Cassie, wild-eyed and determined, grabs a scapple from her bag to carve Nina’s name into Al’s flailing body, Al somehow frees his left arm from the handcuffs and climbs ontop of Cassie, pulls a pillow over her face, and smothers her to death. When (most) viewers likely expected classic carnage candy, Emerald Fennell flips expectations on its head before chopping it off. As we soon learn, Cassie planned for the absolute worst, mailing the rape video, attached with an “in case of my disappearance” note, to the lawyer and pre-scheduling texts to Ryan. With Al’s wedding as the backdrop, “Angel of the Morning” soundtracks the film’s last five minutes ⏤ with police cars surrounding the premises and Al being arrested for Cassie’s murder.

Cassie’s and Nina’s deaths could have certainly been prevented if even one single person had believed Nina. But society failed her. We failed her. Truth is: sexual assault survivors rarely get any kind of justice. “Only 5 out of every 1,000 perpetrators will end up in prison,” according to RAINN’s latest statistics. Cassie knew there was only a slim chance she would make it out of that cabin unscathed; it was a risk she was willing to take, even if it meant the ultimate sacrifice. It was like a lamb skipping into a lion’s den, gleefully ready for the slaughter. For many, the film’s finale doesn’t work, and their feelings are valid. For me, however, Promising Young Woman perfectly captures the tragic reality in which we live: two women must die for just one to get justice.

I sit here, writing this piece, with tears staining my cheeks. I think about my own assault and the time I wasted trying to reconcile it in my mind. I think about the hundreds who are abused every single day in this country and who are abandoned by the justice system. I think about when will things ever fucking change. And I think it starts with me, and it starts with believing women.

Just… believe women.

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