How 'Promising Young Woman' Honestly Deconstructs Rape Culture

***WARNING: SPOILERS***

The trailer for Promising Young Woman, which was released in December, promises a slick, gritty revenge thriller about a renegade heroine who disposes of creeps and rapists with style and finesse. But the film is far more complex than that. Beneath its pastel coloring, neon signage, and pop music remixes lies a grim deconstruction of rape culture, and how those afflicted by it attempt to heal from it.

The film opens with the protagonist, Cassie (played by Carrie Mulligan), slumped over at a club. She can barely speak, let alone fend for herself. “Every week, I go to a club, I act like I'm too drunk to stand,” Cassie tells us via voiceover. “And every week a nice guy comes over to see if I'm OK.” Throughout the movie, we see just that: “Nice guys” attempt to take Cassie home with them, despite her inability to form complete sentences. She allows these men to reach the precipice of sexual assault before dropping her act and soberly pulling the rug out from under them.

But despite the trailer’s insinuations, Cassie’s goal isn’t to murder these men, but to force them to numbly reckon with their attempted assaults. Once a promising young medical student, Cassie is now a 30-year-old med school dropout who works as a barista and lives in her childhood bedroom. A shell of her former self, she is racked with mourning, having saddled herself with an obsession with avenging the sexual assault and eventual suicide of her childhood friend Nina Fischer. Her way of doing that is to get each man she encounters to confront the idea that they are not in fact “nice,” but predators.

Promising Young Woman eradicates the idea that abusers are nightmarish stalkers who pull women into dark alleys. In fact, the movie goes out of its way to establish this point by weaponizing the public personas of the actors cast in these roles, priming audiences to want to trust the characters to capsize their expectations. First, there’s Adam Brody, best known as the innocent and charming Seth Cohen from The O.C., who tells Cassie she’s safe as he tries to remove her underwear. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who became famous for playing the harmless and dorky McLovin in Superbad, lectures Cassie about how hard it is to be a man and how Cassie should wear less makeup before rubbing cocaine on her gums while she’s incapacitated. Sam Richardson, who’s most famous for playing the interminably good-natured Richard Splett on Veep, plays a vulgar, predatory, fedora-wearing douchebag. Nina’s rapist, Al Monroe, is played by Chris Lowell, who most recently found acclaim as the infantile sap, Bash Howard, on Netflix’s GLOW. Al’s best friend is played by Max Greenfield, best known as the neurotic, charming, and protective Schmidt on New Girl. Lastly, Bo Burnham, known for his authentic and introspective comedy, whose entire career is imbued by a sense of self-awareness and kindness, plays Ryan, a former classmate of Cassie’s who eventually takes on the role of love interest.

In addition to the “nice guys” she manipulates, Cassie admonishes and tricks an old friend (Allison Brie) who blamed Nina for her own sexual assault, castigates the dean (Connie Britton) who gave Nina’s rapist “the benefit of the doubt,” and interrogates the lawyer (Alfred Molina) who threatened and smeared Nina’s name, leaving him a blubbering husk of regret. Yet, her momentum is halted following a meeting between Cassie and Nina’s mom (Molly Shannon). Despite Cassie’s devotion to Nina’s memory, Mrs. Fischer begs Cassie to move on with her life illustrating that Cassie’s pursuit of vengeance has actually become her crutch.

Here the film upends its revenge-fueled momentum, diverting from a cathartic romp to a meditation on a woman consumed by grief, who is chasing relief. It’s this shift that makes the film so effective: Its strength is in its subversion. It offers itself as a movie about revenge, one that should result in comeuppance and closure, but instead largely culminates with deflation. Writer-director Emerald Fennell gives you just enough moments to believe that Cassie is on the path to healing, like when Cassie and Ryan frolic around a department store and eat pizza in bed together during a montage scored by Paris Hilton’s Stars Are Blind. The movie articulates Cassie’s growth best in a dinner scene involving Cassie, Ryan, and Cassie’s parents. It’s a muted scene with unassuming banter about sauce and pasta, but it’s bookended by Cassie’s dad telling her that he’s glad to have his daughter back.

Ultimately, though, the film concludes in a reality in which far too few women receive the justice and vindication that Cassie is searching for. The final act begins with Cassie learning new information about Nina’s sexual assault, which destroys the growth and acceptance she had begun to achieve. Cassie heads to Al Monroe’s bachelor party after blackmailing Ryan for the information, incapacitates the entire bachelor party with spiked Vodka except for Al, whom she takes upstairs to mutilate with a scalpel — only for Al to break free and smother her with a pillow. Al’s best man finds them there, and utters perhaps the most gutting line of dialogue in the movie to Al: “It’s not your fault.”Al and his best man try to dispose of Cassie’s body, while Ryan lies to police about his knowledge of Cassie’s whereabouts.

Cassie’s death, while crushing, isn’t as upsetting as the affirmation that the patriarchy is seemingly infallible, and that Cassie’s mission was essentially for naught. In the film’s final moments, the audience sees that Cassie was able to orchestrate comeuppance from beyond the grave with some meticulous pre-planning and a little suspension of disbelief. But while her elaborate plan forces Al and Ryan to face the consequences of their actions (to varying degrees), Cassie is no longer around to witness this semblance of justice or find peace. The movie shows us that while men can always retroactively justify their actions, women must plan for every potentiality.

The film’s approach to dismantling how sexual assault is discussed, dismissed, and adjudicated by a patriarchal society is designed to be exasperating and provocative, similar to the experience of being a women in a society that routinely objectifies them. For this reason, the movie is never allowed to be all that it promises to be, but that’s intentional. The task of trying to execute a systematic takedown of tangible rape culture, while searching for catharsis, was always going to crush Cassie for reasons beyond her control. It’s in that disheartening unpleasantness where we find Promising Young Woman’s greatest strength.