The Tragedy of a Promising Young Woman

It was quite rare for me, but the other night after a movie June and I watched that evening, I not only dreamed about the film but also lay awake thinking for a while about the problems portrayed in it. The movie was Promising Young Woman.  

Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman

A Noteworthy Film

Wikipedia’s article about Promising Young Woman says it is “a 2020 American black comedy thriller film . . . .Carey Mulligan stars as a woman who seeks to avenge her best friend, who was a victim of rape.”

I don’t want to be a spoiler for those who haven’t seen the movie yet, so suffice it to say that when Cassie, the Carey Mulligan character, was a medical student, her fellow student Nina was raped at a party. That led to the death of Nina and to Cassie’s withdrawal from med school.

At the age of 30, Cassie is still a troubled soul and in devious ways seeks revenge for her wronged friend. How she gets her revenge makes for an intriguing movie, which seemed to us much more of a tragic thriller than a comedy of any sort.

Promising Young Woman picked up five nominations for this year’s Oscars, including best film and best actress.

A Noteworthy Actress

This is the third movie I have seen this year starring Carey Mulligan. After reading noted Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 dystopian science fiction novel Never Let Me Go, I watched the 2010 movie by the same name, which stars Mulligan.

Then June and I watched An Education, the 2009 coming-of-age drama film in which Mulligan was the leading actress—and I was impressed with her again. So even before the Academy Award nominations were announced, we placed Promising Young Woman on our Netflix DVD queue.

As I feared would be the case, Mulligan was not nearly as “wholesome” in the new movie as she was in the two made ten years earlier. But she certainly played a powerful part, and I was impressed with her acting ability in the somewhat sordid role of a troubled woman seeking revenge.

Noteworthy Problems

The central problem that lay beneath Promising Young Woman was that of excessive drinking and men taking advantage, or at least trying to take advantage, of inebriated women.

A writer on the March 26 BBC News website (see here) called Mulligan’s film “deeply troubling.”

The writer, director, and producer of Promising Young Woman is Emerald Fennell, who like Mulligan was born in London in 1985. The BBC article says that she drew on her own experiences seeing drunk girls being taken advantage of. “It’s a huge part of hook-up culture,” she stated.

Fennell goes on to say that “there still isn't that much opprobrium [= harsh criticism] on people who sleep with very drunk girls. It was absolutely commonplace when I was growing up, I think probably in most places it still is.”

Of course, the main problem is that of men taking advantage of intoxicated girls. Without question, no one should be taken advantage of for any reason at any time.

But excessive drinking is also a grave problem. Nina was in a position to be taken advantage of because of being drunk, but her male classmate(s) who raped her had, no doubt, been drinking heavily also. If they had been sober, surely they would not have raped her (and videoed it) at the party.

There still tends to be the inclination to blame victims. Last month the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a defendant could not be found guilty of rape because the woman got drunk voluntarily beforehand (see here). That was a highly questionable ruling.

No woman deserves to be raped for any reason, ever.

As in my dream, I still feel troubled that so many women are taken advantage of—and that (intemperate) drinking is so often a major factor in the tragic lives of many promising young women (and men).

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** Those who have seen the movie may be interested in this insightful review article posted April 7 on the website of Baptist News Global.