Angel of Death: Promising Young Woman, Revisited

Subtextual Healing Film Club #2

“Fuck her!”

The first line of dialogue in Promising Young Woman acts as a sort of stand in statement for most of the men in this film. And it’s not that they don’t pay attention to the women around them (in fact, they pay too much attention) , it’s simply that they disregard them as having full and meaningful existences outside of their purview. And it’s also not true that all the men in the film are completely awful, either (though most of them are). The real problem is that the majority of them think that they are much better than they are, or at the very least “nice enough”. They don’t see how their attitudes, actions, and assumptions play into a larger system of oppression for the women who share their world. Instead, they see themselves as different and distant from all that because they’re husbands, doctors, writers, fathers, deep, complicated, and they ask women if they’re okay before making their moves on them. The truth is they’re all more linked together and similar than they’d like to present themselves to be. They want to be seen as nice rather than actually being kind and loving people. There’s perhaps nothing more ominous in this movie than the question that many of the men ask Cassie, “Are you okay?”, because it betrays their real intentions.

One of the brilliant strokes of Promising Young Woman is that one could easily envision this as a type of reverse-horror film wherein Cassie becomes a stalker and killer of these men. But she’s not looking to create more victims, she’s here to enact confrontations and draw confessions. It’s a murder in its own way, a death of their ability to see themselves as innocent. The men confronted by Cassie can’t really believe themselves to be blameless after these encounters and in this way she lives out a vigilante existence in a corrupt world. In many ways she is a modern-day superhero, putting on a disguise and going out into the night to fight this rogues gallery of “nice guys”. Through this mission, she herself becomes a dark knight, a crusader, an avenger.

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1. What are my initial thoughts after watching this time around?

• I absolutely love the title sequence after Cassie’s confrontation with Adam Brody’s Jerry. She walks down the street eating a jelly donut but the jelly has seemingly poured down her arm and is marked on her clothes. It jolts the viewer at first because we wonder if it’s blood instead. It’s a great and unsettling opening scene.

• Promising Young Woman reminds me a lot of 2011’s Drive, which coincidentally also stars Carey Mulligan. Both films feature a protagonist who mirrors a hero archetype in a modern setting full of violence. They’re also both heavily stylized and designed worlds with bright color palettes that contrasts with the heavy subject matter. Both include soundtracks that borrow heavily from recent time periods, Drive featuring a ton of 80s-inspired synth pop while Promising Young Woman borrows from the late 60s all the way into the late 90s and early aughts.

• I think the casting of this film is quite stellar from top to bottom, the choice of actors is thoughtful by playing against type. This is a film that knows its audience.

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2. What makes this film stand out and what continues to resonate?

• Carey Mulligan’s performance. She’s always been a quality actor who makes conscious decisions her films, but here she takes center stage with such a complex role. She’s both determined and devastated, yet we see sparks of hope within her as well that are believable. We root pretty quickly for her character.

• Religious iconography - I’ve included a few stills from the movie where Cassie represents everything from an angelic being, to a Christ figure, and finally to a saint (there are multiple times in the film where she has a halo above or behind her). Does the symbolism represent how she sees herself? Is she an angel that protects or is she an angel of death? Does she reach a type of sainthood, with her mission accomplished, by the end of the film? Of course, these questions are directed more to the audience in order to analyze and answer rather than provided in the text.

• Color Schema - As mentioned previously, vibrant colors populate this film. Through a majority of the movie, Cassie is seen in pinks and deep reds, the latter representing her decisiveness and determination, perhaps also to symbolize the fiery passion that drives her crusade. The more she falls for Ryan, however, the colors begin to change. Ryan is often seen in greens and blues. As things appear to go well in their relationship, she adopts his dominant color by wearing a blue dress that also communicates a cooling down phase in her life. It’s in this moment that she is about to finally let go and embrace a “normal” existence. That will obviously change, and so too does the color scheme.

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3. Let’s get subtextual. What lies beneath this piece of art?

• This film was released a couple of years after the #MeToo movement created a renewed discourse around sexual assault and abuses of power. Emerald Fennell’s screenplay features poignant lines of dialogue that reflect attitudes that are held and spoken by many men today. They’re so outlandish that they’re almost comical, if they weren’t also so reflective of our reality.

  • Al Monroe: “It's every man's worst nightmare, getting accused of something like that.” (speaking about sexual assault). Cassie’s response, “Can you guess what every woman's worst nightmare is?”

  • Jordan (Monroe’s lawyer): “You know, I got a bonus for every settlement out of court. I got another bonus for every charge dropped. We all did. There was a guy... his only job was to go through all their social media accounts for any compromising information. He contacted old friends, past sexual partners. Oh, you'd be amazed how much easier it is now with the internet to dig up dirt. In the old days we used to go through a girl's trash. Now? One drunk photo at a party. Oh, you wouldn't believe how hostile that makes a jury.”

  • Joe, to Al (after he just killed Cassie): “This is NOT your fault!”

• A few questions I’ve been considering since I rewatched: Was Cassie successful in her mission? And was it an effective strategy? What were her initial goals and did they change over time? At the beginning of the film, it seems that she wants to create a confrontation and get these men to admit their wrongdoing. She scares them by warning them that this could happen again at any point if they attempt another transgression in the future (and that there could be worse consequences). But does that or will that change these men? Is it more important that their actions are deterred even if it doesn’t alter how they see women? When she discovers that Al Monroe is back in the U.S. and getting married, it appears to give Cassie a new opportunity to take a more systemic approach to the injustice that Nina suffered and so she goes after Monroe’s lawyer and Dean Walker. Fennell seems to be arguing that while it is important to go after the men who abuse, the entire system that enables these men to exist must also be taken down too.

• Fennell’s attention on forgiveness is also worth highlighting. Can abusers and enablers find a path forward, or at least a form of absolution, after all is said and done? It is an interesting detail that Cassie forgives Jordan but not Ryan. Jordan’s plea, as awkward and discomforting as it is, appears genuine. He’s a man racked with guilt by all of his profiteering and he begs Cassie for her forgiveness. Ryan, however, asks for forgiveness but ties it to his reputation and his work as a doctor. So many of the males in this movie want forgiveness but on their terms, in order that they can keep their jobs and families and reputations. It’s not at all about the harm they have caused and so these men continue to disregard the women in their lives as they did previously. Much of the dialogue in our society about people getting “cancelled” revolves more around the ability of abusers to return to normal rather than a reckoning of how they’ve destroyed the lives of others.

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4. Interesting details and trivia about the film

• Promising Young Woman was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Actress at the 93rd Academy Awards (2020). It won for Best Original Screenplay.

• Director Emerald Fennell was the first female director to be nominated for a debut film.

• The title of the film most likely derives from the comment a judge made in the trial of Brock Turner, a Stanford student athlete who was convicted on three counts of felony sexual assault. Turner was given an extremely light sentence of six months after his conviction and the judge in the trial justified the sentencing because he considered Turner a “promising young man”.

• The toughest scene in the film is the death of Cassie at the hands of Alexander Monroe. Emerald Fennell asked her father-in-law, a retired police officer, how long it would take to kill someone by smothering them and he told her over two and half minutes. That is roughly how long the smothering scene lasts in the film.

• Many of the male actors cast in the film were deliberately chosen because they often played “nice guys” in prior tv shows and films.

• The film was originally supposed to end with Cassie’s death. I’m happy that it didn’t.

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5. Final impressions and notes

• I think Bo Burnham gives a really strong performance here too. While most audiences will pick up on where his character will ultimately end up, it doesn’t necessarily make it any less devastating when it happens.

• Ending the movie with “Angel of the Morning” by Juice Newton is a nice touch and callback to Cassie’s role in the film. She’s an angel all right, just not one that you want to run into.

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What do you think of Promising Young Woman? Share your thoughts!