The night before the year turn is a time of reflection. For hindsight; the lessons gleaned from introspection. Emerald Fennell's dark comedy -- and I'm not entirely comfortable giving it that label -- forces viewers to consider our lifetime of actions and how those action affected others.
Carey Mulligan stars as Cassie who, in her late 20s, struggles to make progress in life. She's stuck due to tragedy that occurred years earlier when Nina, her best friend and medical school classmate, was raped. Cassie spends most of her time secretly planning and carrying out revenge on sexual predators and those who enable it. Her family and friends know she's stuck and try to support her in getting her life back on track. But she can't move on; she's too obsessed, too focused.
She's consumed by vengeance.
Fennell uses subtle color schemes to pull back the curtain on Cassie's psychology. The color of ink she chooses when keeping tally of the men encountered while on the prowl suggests some were treated more harshly than others. She paints each fingernail a different, bright color that suggests whimsey to everyone around her, masking that her attention to her goal is laser focused. And Fennel briefly invokes a scene from Joker to suggest that Cassie has reached an emotional breaking point.
Promising Young Woman is a very good film. But what makes it great is that it forces the audience to identify in our own lives that line between bad behavior and behavior that happens because "we were just kids and didn't know any better."
In my life, and perhaps in yours too, that line has moved as we've matured. The problem is how -- not if but how -- our behavior has affected the lives of other people, and what damage we've caused family, friends, and acquaintances caught in our wake.
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