The movie, which was released in theatres on Christmas and came to streaming on January 15th, centers on a med-school dropout named Cassie-a flinty, inscrutable Carey Mulligan-who works in a coffee shop, lives with her parents, and spends her nights going to bars and night clubs and pretending to be dangerously, blindly intoxicated. “Promising Young Woman,” the directorial début of Emerald Fennell, who was the showrunner for the second season of “Killing Eve,” is steeped in sexual violence: the ubiquity of it, the way that it can be tedious and life-destroying in turn.
We don’t need the word itself, of course, to see what’s going on. The word “rape” does not appear once in “Promising Young Woman.” Women “put themselves in danger.” They’re “asking for it,” and anyone could “take advantage.” A rape is “what happened.” It’s “unusual circumstances,” “the accusations,” “a he-said, she-said situation,” the inevitable result of “a bad choice.” These euphemisms, like all clichés, have been repeated until they have lost all meaning, stones turned smooth by a river.
