Promising Young Woman

In the 1990’s, I was a grad student at UMASS Amherst, a renown party school. The high-rise dorms there were said to be one of the most densely populated places in the world where young men and women were crammed together in a petrie dish environment. I lived in a lovely apartment off campus next door to three male students who were undergrads and known campus-wide for their epic weekend ragers where beer and alcohol flowed freely.

I went to a couple of these parties, but they weren‘t really my kind of scene. Students drank until they couldn’t see straight or stand. Nobody really worried about getting home because everybody lived so close that they walked if they were sober enough. And if you were too drunk to walk, you could stay the night on a couch or the floor and go home the next morning. These parties happened almost every other week, and I saw a lot of guys and girls sneaking off into bedrooms or bathrooms to do...well...what a lot of people did at these parties - have sex.

On the surface, the parties seemed innocent enough. Everyone looked forward to them, and they were always packed. But one morning after a party late in the spring, when I opened the door to leave my apartment for class, I saw all of the walls of the hallway, down the stairs, and plastered all over the front door signs that read “[Name of boy in Apt C] is a rapist.”

That afternoon, I came home from school and ran into said boy in the hallway leaving his apartment. He was crying and asked if I had seen the signs. I told him I had. He said, “You don’t believe that do you? I wouldn’t do that. I’m a good guy.“ In that moment, it was really hard to respond because, in general, yes, he was a “good guy.” But did I believe something illicit and terrible had happened? I’d seen what happened at those parties, and it wasn’t beyond the scope of my imagination that, perhaps a girl had been drunk and made to do something she didn’t want to do because she wasn’t capable of saying, ”No.”

Such is the setting for “Promising Young Woman,“ written and directed by Emerald Fennell whose work I love. (She just played Camilla Parker Bowles in the third season of “The Crown,” and penned season two of “Killing Eve.”) In this dark and pretty demented drama, Fennell explores campus rape culture prior to the #metoo movement.

Cassie (played by Carey Mulligan) is a med school dropout who lives with her parents and slums it as a barista by day. By night, she’s a woman with a vicious vendetta. Posing drunk and nearly passed out in bars around town, whenever a self-proclaimed “nice guy” offers to take care of her she goes along for the ride, only later to reveal her true motivations on those who subsequently try to take advantage of a woman incapable of offering consent. Things get incredibly complicated, however, when she reconnects with an old college friend named Ryan and the past rears it’s ugly head. Cassie is forced to relive the horrific events of a drunken night at a party, and see the successes of those who perpetrated crimes for which they’ve never been punished. Taking matters into her own hands, Cassie exacts revenge for herself, her best friend, and any woman who has ever been sexually assaulted by a seemingly “nice guy.” Not gonna lie. This movie is dark. But like “Killing Eve,“ Fennell has brilliantly balanced that with Cassie’s wit and sarcasm. There are times when Cassie is able to let go and find happiness. It’s not like she’s totally given up on life. She’s just given up on believing that there really is such a think as a good guy who, given the chance, actually WOULD do the right thing. Every time she goes out and pretends to be drunk, she’s actually hoping beyond hope that somebody won’t be a total douchebag and will actually help her and restore at least a smidge of her faith in the male species. But even when she thinks she’s found “the one,” she’s let down. Ugh. It sucks. And for the last 24 hours since seeing the movie I‘ve constantly been going back to that moment at UMASS, and seeing the signs on the walls, put there by a girl who probably wasn’t given a choice, and how she will carry that for the rest of her life. And Mr. Nice Guy? After that day we heard nothing about the incident again. He kept going to class. The parties continued. He graduated, and probably went on with his life.