Promising Young Woman Review
TW: Rape, sexual assault, violence, suicide, and depression
Disclaimer: This movie is created around a heterosexual dynamic and white people, but this situation happens to all genders, all sexualities, and all races. While wealthy white people are victims of sexual assault, impoverished people of color are victims much more often and do not often have the resources to get help.
Before I dive into this review, I want to say a quick happy International Women’s day to everyone there! This review and movie deal with a massive issue in our country that predominately affects women and being able to bring attention to such a horrible thing on the day when we are celebrating women seems like a perfect way to remind everyone that we should be supporting and lifting up women every day! Not just once a year on social media so people can pretend they are feminists. As fun as it would be to make a post about how awesome women are, I think it is equally as important to talk about all of the things women have to go through on a daily basis to survive in this patriarchal society. So that is what I am here to do today instead.
One last note: this is a movie. It is not based on true events, and it is a kind of thriller/suspenseful movie in a lot of ways. I do not condone all of her choices in this movie, but there is so much to unpack here in regards to how these situations are often handled, but of course, they had to make it entertaining to watch. There are also spoilers ahead to please keep reading with caution!
Promising Young Woman opens with a scene of businessmen at a bar, presumably after work, dancing and chatting while they drink. There is a group of men who are talking about they are going to be closing some business deal at a male-only golf course, and whether or not it’s an issue that they will be leaving out the woman who is working on this deal as well. Before they can decide whether this is an issue or not, they notice Carrie Mulligan’s charter slumped over on the side of the club, looking for something, and clearly very drunk. One of the men goes over there, says he will get her an Uber home, and as soon as they are in the Uber he starts asking her to come back to his place for one more drink before she lays down for the night. She is clearly very hammered and can barely keep her head up so he makes the decision to take her back to his place. Once there, he gives her more booze even though she says she wants to lay down, then he does let her lay down in his bed and starts undressing her. The whole time she is asking what he is doing, and he just keeps repeating over and over again “don’t worry, you’re safe.” At this point she pops up, completely sober, to ask him more clearly what it is he thinks he is doing.
This is the moment we get the main preemie of this movie; Cassie (Carrie Mulligan) has suffered some sort of trauma and the way she copes is by acting drunk and seeing if men will try and take advantage of her in her intoxicated state. Most times, the men say something like “But I’m a good guy. I’m a feminist. I was taking care of you”, and so many other cliche atrocities to make themselves feel better about what they did or were going to do. She proves time and time again that men ultimately do not care about the woman they are trying to have sex with. They want to get their rocks off and a drunk woman offers the path of least resistance. How pesky is consent right? (She said dripping with sarcasm.)
The first aspect I want to take about real fast is the way that men react to her when they find out that she is sober. They all initially react with anger because she was feigning being drunk and how dare she do that? That’s so creepy! She must be a psycho! How dare you actually be sober even though I was really hoping you were drunk so I could take advantage of you and not really have to deal with you like you are a person! The best example of this is a man who tried to get her to do cocaine when she is barely coherent, then when that isn’t working she asks for water because she feels sick. So he brings her water, forces her to wake up, and assumes she’s fine after drinking one sip of water. Now the real kicker here is he attempts to cover his ass but talking about how women feel forced to wear makeup because of some stereotype and pressure forced on women. He acts like such a feminist who knows what women have to deal with on a regal basis and how hard it must be to exist as a woman in this world. But when she acts as sober as she really is, all of his feminist thoughts go right out the window. This moment perfectly shows how men react when they feel cornered or are made to feel like the bad guy. Every man wants to be a feminist until they actually have to act on it and do the right thing for women. I will also not be answering any comments about “not all men”, because believe me, yes all men.
Spoiler Ahead. One of the more important aspects of the film is that when Cassie is starting to get “better” in front of her friends and family and no longer focusing on the trauma, she starts to date a man named Ryan. This is a man she knew in med school before she dropped out, and they begin a love affair and have a lot of fun together, presumably showing that Cassie can trust men again. But shortly after they tell each other they love one another, a woman named Madison comes over to the house to give Cassie a phone that has a video on it about the night that lead Cassie to this point in her life. See, up until now things have been a little vague, but here we end out that Cassie’s best friend since childhood, Nina, was raped at a party by a man named Al while he let all of his friends watch. There was a video that was taken by one friend that showed that Cassie’s new love and good guy presenting Ryan, was there and saw what happened that night. While there are so many other important moments in this film, this one especially stuck out to me because it really shows that not saying something is just as bad as being the one who is doing the bad thing. We later find out that Nina has died by suicide as a direct result of things that happened after she was raped which is why Cassie does what she does; to get revenge on the kinds of people who lead to her friend’s death. This moment shows that even the guy who is good, who is nice, and who will help you, can also be the guy who was there for something he should have stood up again. Ryan was complicit in this moment by seeing Nina raped and not trying to stop it or trying to tell anyone else at the party that something bad was happening. He laughs, he makes comments, and when Cassie confronts him about what he saw he says “I was a kid, I was drinking. I didn’t do anything wrong.” Hate to break it to ya Ryan, but you definitely did. This isn’t the main takeaway from the movie, but this was such an important pivot that men need to see who watches this movie. He didn’t see his being a bystander as wrong because he wasn’t the one who raped Nina. He thought in the trial that resulted from that was wrong because he stood by his friend and if Al said he hadn’t raped her then he must not have. The stat of 1 in 6 women will be raped in her lifetime (this is based on women who have reported and not many do so it is likely higher) also means there is a high percentage of Ryan’s out there who have seen or know something but choose not to say anything because their buddy said they didn’t do anything wrong. So, anyone out there reading this, don’t be a Ryan. Do something for the people who may not be able to help themselves at the moment.
The next portion we need to talk about is Madison and Dean Walker. These are both women who were also complicit in Nina’s rape and lead to her death by their inaction. Madison was a friend and classmate of Nina and Cassie’s who Nina told about her situation the morning after it happened. Madison doesn’t listen and thinks she is wrong based on the fact that Nina liked to sleep around in med school. If Nina was such a “slut” then she was bound to have some encounters she didn’t like. If Nina liked to get drunk and party, then she was leaving herself open to these kinds of problems. Dean Walker was the one Nina filed a complaint with at the school when she was raped by Al. The dean remembers Al, she speaks highly of him, and she even talks about how she can’t take every accusation seriously because then she would ruin so many young men’s lives. She felt bad for Nina, she did. She hoped she was doing ok and she was sorry things had gone the way that they did. But she had to deal with these things all the time and innocent until proven guilty right? The interactions that Cassie has with both of these two women do a great job of how this patriarchal mindset can affect women and not just men by making it so women don’t even care about rape or any other sexual assault unless it directly affects them. Now with this one, I will say it does feel as though with movements like #MeToo more and more women are no longer falling into this category or into this issue of thinking men must be right, but there does still seem to be a phenomenon represented well here that women in positions of power don’t want to rock the boat by taking a woman’s side when she says she has been raped.
There is one more aspect I want to talk about before summarizing as a whole here and that is the conversation between Cassie and Al at the very end. She gets into her Batchelor party as a fake stripper and gets him upstairs to give him a “private dance” but cuffs him to the bed and forces him to talk to her about what happened. He never once admits to what he has done and instead says that what Nina said affected him too. He was ruined by it too. And then my favorite part of the whole movie happens: Al says, “It’s every man’s worst nightmare to be accused like that.” Cassies says “Can you imagine what every woman’s worst nightmare is?” That sums up how most men approach rape in this society; they see it as something to be wary of so they don’t get accused in case they make the wrong woman mad, they don’t see it as something they should avoid because a woman deserves respect and deserves to be treated like a person. Women have to be careful not to drink too much, to watch their drinks, go out in groups, someone needs to stay sober to watch out for the others, not to wear anything to slutty, don’t sleep around because if you do you put yourself at risk, and so much more. And the worst part is you can follow every single rule and do everything right and still get sexually assaulted.
I loved this movie if you couldn’t tell. They handled the nuances of rape culture in our society so perfectly and gave each issue a character that was acted out in the movie. It was done so well to the point that it made me livid watching these characters act out and say certain things about Nina and Cassie and what ended up happening to both of them. The movie perfectly showed how men in those situations band together and do whatever they can at all costs to keep themselves and their friends safe without any regard to what the woman has been through or what she is saying. In thecae of this movie, we see that even if the man sees what has happened, if he was there, he still will protect his friends at all costs. This movie shows that while this society is out there to protect men and all the things they could potentially grow into being, we leave all the promising young women behind.
Madey
Sources:
Sexual assault stat here
Trailer for the movie here
Cover art by Avery Lynch