Boxoffice Pro - April 2020

Carey Mulligan has an eye
out for trouble in Promising
Young Woman
Image courtesy Focus Features
“Every week I go to a club. I act like
I’m too drunk to stand. And every
week a ‘nice guy’ comes over to see if I’m
OK.” So speaks Cassie of Promising Young
Woman, the debut feature of writer-director
Emerald Fennell. Years ago, Cassie
dropped out of med school following
the assault of a friend; now her weekend
hobby is showing an endless parade of
dudes how very, very wrong they are in
taking a “drunk” woman home and trying
to get into her pants. But there’s a twist:
the arrival into her life of ex-classmate
Ryan (Bo Burnham) brings the possibility
for healing, along with unresolved feelings
about the event that left her traumatized.
A new mission emerges.
Candy-colored and unabashedly girly
in its aesthetic, Promising Young Woman
offers a welcome take on the revenge
thriller, switching out the raw violence
common to the genre for a more nuanced
interrogation of the pervasive culture
of sexual harassment. In advance of the
film’s April 17 release from Focus Features,
Fennell took the time to speak about her
debut feature—starting with an unabashed
love-fest for her lead actress.
Congratulations on the film. I’ll see
Carey Mulligan in just about anything.
So I was excited for this, and it didn’t
disappoint.
Oh, she’s amazing.
I read somewhere that you thought
there was no way in hell you’d get her
for this film.
Oh God, no, of course not! She’s Carey
Mulligan! She’s incredibly selective about
what she does and who she works with,
so I really didn’t think I stood much of a
chance. Luckily, I somehow managed to
persuade her. And I’m so, so glad, because
I really do think she’s the backbone of all
of this. She grounds the characters in such
truth. It’s a heightened movie, and it’s a
heightened experience, and it needed that.
That’s one of the things I like about
the film: its groundedness. You see
Cassie wrestling with her trauma and
trying to get better, as opposed to
just going on a killing spree.
The revenge movie is a genre that I
absolutely love, but I think it’s also ripe for
subversion. Also, I don’t know any women
who resort to violence, really. It’s very
rare. And so I wanted to write a revenge
movie that was honest about the process
of grieving and the process of trauma. And
also honest about how a woman might
teach lessons or frighten people. What she
does is still very dangerous to herself, and
I think possibly that might even be part of
why she does it. It struck me that I’d never
seen a movie like this with a character who
felt like she might do something that a real
woman might do.
So many revenge movies are escapist,
in a way. Men get away with awful
things all the time in the real world,
and in revenge movies, they get
brutally murdered for it.
It’s escapist, and it’s cathartic. And it’s
effective. But it’s not honest or real. This
movie was about taking those things that
are so appealing to us as audience members—so
neat and tidy—and pulling them
apart and looking at them. For me—the
same as in “Killing Eve”—if you’re going
to have violence in a movie, you need to be
honest about what violence looks like and
what it is. You have an obligation to show it
in a way that feels real. We’re so immune to
violence. When you show what it looks like,
really, it’s much more uncomfortable than
the almost titillating violence that I think
we’re used to on TV and in film. [Fennell
was the show runner and head writer for
season two of the acclaimed BBC show
“Killing Eve.”] There’s a scene in “Killing
Eve” when Eve kills for the first time with
an ax. It’s kind of horrific. I just didn’t want
it to be a moment that was like, “OK, gun,
fine.” Imagine actually killing someone
with an ax as a woman who’d never killed
someone before. It’s always looking at
these things that we’re used to and saying,
“OK, what actually would you feel like?” I
don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say
that when there is violence in this film, it
is troubling. As it should be.
Some of the things that Cassie does
are uncomfortable to watch. You’re
like, “No, no, what are you doing?”
The power that women have is to frighten.
That’s what she does. She is frightening. I
didn’t want to shy away from that, from
the fact that some of the decisions she
makes aren’t nice or good. Because she’s
so angry. But it was important to me
nevertheless that things aren’t quite what
they seem, that she’s very particular and
careful about the smoke and mirrors that
she puts in place.
April 2020
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