Movie Reviews

The Agony And Subversion Of The ‘Promising Young Woman’ Ending

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Emerald Fennell’s scathing revenge thriller is shocking and deliberately unsatisfying.

This essay contains major spoilers for Promising Young Woman, which now streams on Hulu

By Aisha Harris

How do you like your revenge served on screen – via torture? In flames? A massive bloodbath?

How about … via text message?

This is how Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell’s cheeky, tart and provocative tale of a woman reeling from the trauma of her best friend’s sexual assault and subsequent suicide years earlier, ends. Well, that’s partly how it ends; to be more accurate, it concludes with Cassie (Carrie Mulligan) dead at the hands of Al, the man who raped her friend, but getting the final word by having left behind clues as to her whereabouts in the event of her disappearance. In a final kiss-off, Cassie sends a pre-scheduled text to her ex Ryan (who, it turns out, was present during the rape) just as Al is arrested in the middle of his own wedding for her murder.

It’s an incredibly bleak and unsatisfying fate. It’s also an inspired creative choice.

Promising Young Woman has been described as a revenge thriller, and the “thrill” of such movies is supposed to be in watching the comeuppance for the perpetrator(s). But the genre has its limitations. Even among the best examples, there’s often an overreliance on the idea that retribution in the form of physical pain and/or death equals a form of justice. (See: The quite good but also very violent John Wick films, which kick off because of a murdered dog.) They also tend to flatten characters into avatars and little else; this is especially potent when applied to wronged-woman protagonists, where the vengeance is not just personal, it’s (ostensibly) a middle finger to the patriarchy, as with films like The Nightingale and The Perfection.

As pure entertainment, are they satisfying? Maybe in the moment. But what do these characters really have left once they’ve enacted their revenge? And what does it mean for us, the viewers, to root for such vindictive outcomes?

In certain ways, Promising Young Woman is a tease, walking its audience up to the edge of conventional elements of the revenge genre only to undercut and upend them. The first clue lies in the set-up. When we’re introduced to Cassie, it’s been several years since Nina’s death, and she’s developed an odd habit: going out to bars alone and pretending to be near-blackout drunk to lure the men who would take advantage of such women. Each time one of them inevitably brings her back to his place, she waits to see just how far he’ll go to hook up with a barely responsive human, before revealing she’s in fact completely sober, thrusting them into a jarring moment of self-reflection.

From a purely creative standpoint, the conceit is clever. It’s hard not to take some pleasure in watching Cassie dress down one of those random, self-described “nice guys,” Neil (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse with just the right amount of creepy, entitled energy): “You woke me up before putting your fingers inside me,” she snarks. “That was sweet.”

But in taking a step back and realizing that this is how she’s coped – assuming the role of a sort of “Scared Straight” vigilante whose mission it is to teach dudes the laws of consent – night after night and week after week, it doesn’t feel like a tension release; it just feels sad. Cassie has spent years clinging to her trauma, having dropped out of med school in the wake of Nina’s death and, metaphorically speaking, life itself. Her parents take notice of her lack of friends, as well as her complete disinterest in pursuing any kind of career. In one scene, even Nina’s own mother urges Cassie to move on and stop living with regret and bitterness for what happened to her daughter.

This is the point. Fennell has described Promising Young Woman using the terminology of addiction, in that targeting guys in bars is a high for Cassie from which she must inevitably be plunged back down into despair, every time. This pattern, the director told IndieWire, typically goes “in one direction.” Addiction narratives, by their nature, are the opposite of catharsis. To watch a character spiral into this state of being is harrowing and anxiety-inducing – Requiem for a Dream, anyone? – and viewers are positioned to hope the character finally seeks help to address their illness, rather than continuing on the path to self-destruction.

But Cassie doesn’t want help; she wants Nina’s absence to reverberate for everyone who’s implicated in her assault and the aftermath, just as it does for her. Perhaps most disturbing and unusual of Cassie’s intended acts of vengeance is carried out on Madison (Alison Brie), a former friend. After Madison refuses to atone for dismissing Nina’s accusations all those years before, Cassie hires a strange man to bring an extremely inebriated Madison back to a hotel room, so that when Madison awakens, she believes she might have been assaulted. (It’s later revealed to be a fake-out.)

Cassie’s methods complicate our understanding of rape revenge thrillers, and in doing so, they unfurl the lie that is “an eye for an eye” – Cassie doesn’t feel better after turning the tables on Madison, the school dean, or the lawyer who, it turns out, is the one person who does show sincere remorse for how he failed Nina. It’s still not enough.

Fennell’s interest in centering the victim’s trauma rather than the offender’s punishment is unusual for this kind of movie. The majority of the 2005 film Hard Candy, for instance, hinges on the bait and subsequent torture 14-year-old Hayley (Elliot Page) enacts upon a 32-year-old photographer named Jeff (Patrick Wilson), whom she suspects of preying on minors. Like Cassie in Promising Young Woman, Hayley at one point performs an extreme turning-the-tables fake-out of her own, tricking him into believing she’s castrated him. But unlike Cassie, Hayley almost always has the upper hand in her cat-and-mouse game with Jeff, and succeeds in coercing him to kill himself with the promise she’ll never publicly leak the evidence of his crimes after he’s gone.

Hayley is an enigma, and Brian Nelson’s screenplay knows it. In the final act, a mortified and bewildered Jeff wonders who she really is, and if any details she told him about herself were true. Hayley spitefully evades the question with a pointed retort. “I’m every little girl you ever watched, touched, screwed, killed,” she says, cementing her character’s on-paper rendering as a loaded symbol. After he’s hung himself, Hayley runs off and the movie ends. Who is she beyond her motivation for revenge? And how will this affect her psyche going forward?

Promising Young Woman posits that such revenge might be a futile exercise. Cassie’s failure to carry out her plan to get back at Al at his bachelor party is twisted and depressing. Then again, so was her way of dealing – or not dealing – with her grief.

Source: The Agony And Subversion Of The ‘Promising Young Woman’ Ending

Movie Review: The Banshees Of Inisherin

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The small Irish island of Inisherin, 1923. Pádraic (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) have been friends for as long as anyone can remember. But one day, while civil war rages on the mainland nearby, Colm suddenly announces that the friendship is over. Pádraic is confused and devastated, while Colm starts taking incomprehensibly drastic measures.

How do you break up with a best friend? It’s a good question, tackled brilliantly by Seinfeld way back in its first season. After all, the rules of social disengagement are pretty clear when it comes to sexual relationships, even more so when they involve divorce. But separating from a buddy you just don’t like anymore? When the pair of you live on a small, scantily populated island with only one pub? How do you go about that?

In Martin McDonagh’s world, the answer is: brutally. After resolving to dissolve his friendship with the dependable but dull Pádraic (Colin Farrell), Colm (Brendan Gleeson) bluntly tells his ex-friend he doesn’t want talk to him or drink with him ever again. No explanation given. No attempt made to soften the blow. Of course, if you’re familiar with writer-director McDonagh’s previous film work, from In Bruges to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, such tactlessness should come as no surprise — McDonagh’s scripts are so abrasive, you could use them as sandpaper. So the focus of the film is less on Colm’s decision, and more on Pádraic’s reaction, not to mention the impact it has on his “limited” (another character’s word, not ours) life.

Ironically, for a story about a friendship-wreck, The Banshees Of Inisherin is also a reunion: of McDonagh with the double act that made the hitman antics of In Bruges such a piquant treat. However, Farrell and Gleeson don’t spend nearly as much time on screen together here, for self-evident reasons. It’s a shame, in a small way, but it does add to the pervading sense of wrongness.

Colm is largely inscrutable, despite the occasional revelation of sorts, and the odd flash of kindliness. McDonagh never fully reveals what drives him to the Pádraic-alienating extremes he goes to later in the film, and that makes him the more emotionally distant of the two men.

This is primarily Pádraic’s story; the tale of a good, decent fella who, through an enforced process of self-examination, finds and embraces other, sharper facets to his personality. Farrell is fantastic in the role, delivering one of his best-ever performances. He takes on a kind of sagging anti-charisma, a seeming guilelessness which he initially plays for laughs, but then gradually and convincingly brews into something much darker.

Complementing him perfectly is Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s savvy sister, Siobhan. Her exasperation at her brother’s response to Colm’s ultra-dick move is thoroughly relatable, and you’ll welcome every moment she spends on screen. Siobhan also evokes the most sympathy as a woman who has clearly, desperately outgrown this cliff- edged, wall-scarred speck of an island — a realisation only underlined by the clumsy amorous attentions of Barry Keoghan’s damaged youth, Dominic, a character that sadly gets the shortest narrative shrift of the bunch.

Tenderly scored by Carter Burwell and gorgeously shot by cinematographer Ben Davis — the drama may be intimate, but the backdrop feels epic — The Banshees Of Inisherin is a film whose unhurried pace never drags. It is, we suppose, McDonagh’s gentlest offering yet (and the fact that his gentlest film involves acts of mutilation says a lot about his other work). That said, you could also argue it is his first war movie. And not just because it is set during the Irish Civil War of 1922-23, which is heard raging just a few miles across the water. After all, Colm and Pádraic’s split is really just that war in microcosm. The causes are obscure and confusing, the emerging conflict escalates fast, the previously close participants employ tactics that would have once been unthinkable. And the after-effects will be felt for years to come.

McDonagh has never been one for neat resolutions, so it’s not giving anything away to say that we’re denied one here, too. This is no bromantic-comedy, and you really shouldn’t be hoping for any feel-good vibes (though there are plenty of laughs, if your humour verges on the dark side). But the film is engrossing and beautifully mounted, and is sure to not disappoint anyone who’s enjoyed McDonagh’s previous rough rides.

Another great feel-bad treat from Martin McDonagh, featuring one of Colin Farrell’s best performances yet as a guy trying (and failing) to deal with the fallout of a falling out.

Source: The Banshees Of Inisherin

The Essex Serpent: Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in gripping, gothic TV

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For better or worse, this is serious, thinky telly where the serpents are metaphorical

By Ed Power

With Game of Thrones on the way back with a dragon-enriched prequel series, many of us will suddenly be in the mood once more for stirring tales of long-necked beasts losing their tempers in a variety of destructive ways. Being unfamiliar with Sarah Perry’s 2016 bestseller The Essex Serpent, I therefore went into Apple’s adaptation (Apple TV +, Friday) foolishly expecting at least one CGI monster before the end of the first episode.

But this, for better or worse, is serious, thinky telly where the serpents are metaphorical and the biggest special effect is the stubble dappling Tom Hiddleston’s A-lister chin.

He plays a worldly rector aghast when his flock starts to pay heed to rumours of a long-necked monster prowling his parish of Aldwinter in coastal Essex in 1893. Hiddleston is best known as charming anti-hero Loki in the Marvel films. Here, however, he is rigorously buttoned down as a man of reason opposite Claire Danes, who portrays Cora Seaborne, a well-to-do widow who has taken up amateur palaeontology following the death from throat cancer of her abusive husband.

With Netflix having gone all in on reality TV and Shonda Rhimes capers, Apple is one of the few remaining repositories of what used to be called “prestige television”. This, as we all know, means slow-moving fare featuring big names grappling with big ideas – and typically adapted from a middle-brow novel.

All those boxes are ticked with The Essex Serpent. Now, obviously, this sort of thing isn’t for everyone. As one of those who likes their serpents very much nonfigurative and given to biting people’s heads off, I find myself constantly yelling “get on with it” while hoping that Hiddleston would suddenly transform into Loki, the whole fandango revealed to be a secret Marvel spin-off.

Yet it is solidly assembled. Danes’s English accent is impeccable – even better than Joe Alwyn’s in Conversations with Friends – and Hiddleston gives good “hunky vicar” as he casts meaningful gazes as Cora (despite being married to Clémence Poésy’s Stella). In other words, it has everything apart from the actual serpent – and, as reminder why prestige television is important and we should continue to watch it, adds up to a gripping gothic slow-burner.

Source: The Essex Serpent: Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in gripping, gothic TV