Review: PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

Three white collar guys chew the fat at a bar and notice that a hot girl is almost passing out on the seats across the room. One of them plays designated nice guy and approaches her to see if she needs help. In the rideshare he guides them to his place, his gentlemanly motives (assuming they were ever there) draining from his face. It gets to a certain point before she asks him point blank what he thinks he's doing, suddenly sober as a judge. That's all in the trailer so don't cry spoiler. But this is a spoiler-prone movie so there won't be much more plot detail from me.

And the thing to do with this elegantly structured urban fable is to sit back and let it in. A screenplay that runs on a need-to-know and keeps to it, peppered with a realistically uneven show of character wit and a long game that you know might not pay off the way you want is here to serve you. And serving it up is writer/director Emerald Fennell, displaying all the skill of but none of the constraints of her TV CV (The Crown and Killing Eve, to name two). I mentioned the trailer just before and am pleased to report that this piece provides much more than its commercial reveals (usually too much)

Cassandra is driven. Carrie Mulligan shows us someone who has thought so long and hard about something that it has made revenge her life's work. But this is not a Sergio Leone vengeance, it's one that contains stings for its own bearer. Mulligan who physicality can make her seem anything from forty to five years old let's us know this without it breaking to other characters. Of note her vocal performance, with a voice as worn-in as an old theatre, consolidates this as it can ward off evil as well as invite. Remember Cassandra could tell the future accurately but no one would believe her. This time she's seeking at least to confront with truth if not persuade by it. Some of her schemes border on Elizabethan levels of horror in their invention and can render her coolly frightening. So how does that gel with the rom com woven into the fabric here? See it and discover.

Something that might strike you in the pre-credit sequence is the use of cover versions. From a dub step Raining Men to what sounds like the Chronos Quartet's take on Toxic we're treated to a jukebox of interpretations. The one original happens ... well, see it and you'll know it. Until then we also see Cassandra as a male's cover version of what an available woman is by action and looks. Cover versions of guilt and remorse also line up and even Cassie herself in her parents' pastel musk stick decorated home looks like an ornament. We soon understand that this is how she is compelled to see the world, a thorny jungle of advantage in which the sweetest smelling fruit might well be fatal to the taste. Her ploys in bars and the numbered acts of her longer game show her as a master, well beyond the bawling efforts of karaoke try-hards, an artist who makes even the oldest chestnuts seem fresh and original.

I had to see this movie in a cinema. It looked good way back in February when I saw the trailer for it as I watched my last movie in a cinema for months upon months. I expected to see it surface on one of the streamers but no. Its release was teased a little recently with a peppering of screenings here and there but now it's out properly. This timing might well put it out of reach of the Academy which is a shame (for Mulligan's performance alone) as its smart approach to "me too" as well as the increasingly feeble "not all men" rejoinder remain timely. This is a tough idea in an accessible package, a glob of fibre smuggled into a sweet. Take a bite, take the whole thing. Now.