PROVOKR PICK: PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN
Carey Mulligan Gets Vengeance
This week we’re doing our PROVOKR Pick a little differently than usual. Instead of recommending a movie that is coming out this Friday, we are promoting Promising Young Woman, which came out in theaters on December 25th. And while Promising Young Woman is currently available to watch in theaters, no streaming date has yet been announced, which means that it might be a few months before you will be able to watch it from the comfort of your own home. That all being said, this film has been buzzed about ever since it debuted at Sundance at the beginning of this year, and since it was released reviewers and filmgoers alike have been raving about the movie, and especially Carey Mulligan’s performance, which has been shortlisted for the Oscars, so we would be remiss if we didn’t write about it too.
In this pitch-black comedy from writer/director Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve), Mulligan stars as Cassie Thomas, a young woman who spends her days working in a coffee shop and her nights as a vigilante, bringing down men who try to sexually assault her. Prior to her barista job, she was a medical student, until a traumatic event caused her to drop out. However, when that event from her past comes back to haunt her, she decides to turn her vigilante justice on everyone involved in the past crime. The rape-revenge genre has been around for some time, from exploitation horror fare like the original I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to more recent offerings like Revenge (2017), Promising Young Woman is a real rape-revenge thriller for the “Me Too” era.
Promising Young Woman had its world premiere on January 25, 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival where Focus Pictures acquired its distribution rights. Like with most other movies this year, its initial release date was postponed because of the pandemic, you know the drill. The movie marks Fennell’s feature film directorial debut. In addition to Mulligan it stars Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Laverne Cox, Chris Lowell, Connie Britton, Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Sam Richardson, Alfred Molina, and Molly Shannon.
