Promising Young Woman

Dear Mark,

The arresting emotional impact of grief is embodied in Promising Young Woman's Cassie, a character unable to resume life after the suicide of her best friend, Nina, who was the victim of sexual assault at university. Nina and Cassie were medical students, and seven years after the rape, Cassie has rejected the conventional successful life trajectory available to her middle-class circumstance, and is instead spending her time in a low paid job, living at home, rejecting relationships, and engaging in a rape revenge crusade by feigning intoxication and tricking men in bars into taking advantage of her before snapping out of her drunkedness at the crucial moment.

Cassie is an empty vessel for Nina's memory, no longer committed to her own life and developmentally arrested in her trauma. In a society where nobody was convicted of her best friend's rape, where nobody remembers what happened, let alone cares, Cassie makes it her life's work to ensure that all those who played a part, even indirectly by turning a blind eye, are challenged to investigate their actions, or indeed, inactions, with ultimately devastating consequences.

The bubblegum pink aesthetic of the film challenges the audiences perception of femininity. Cassie is a pastel-wearing, multi-colour manicured, blonde epitome of girliness, which is all the more shocking when her alter ego as an avenging angel is revealed. Her capabilities are repeatedly underestimated, and her deep sadness and rage are not overtly apparent from external cues alone. The biggest underestimation of Cassie, however, is the profundity of her grief for her best friend, a territory rarely investigated in film or culture generally.

Promising Young Woman is, most importantly, a springboard for discussion around some of the most difficultly visceral challenges of womanhood, and for that alone, it must be highly commended.