Carey Mulligan’s new revenge thriller Promising young woman plays out like a black comedy that deals with very serious subjects. Mulligan plays Cassie, a woman who is haunted by the trauma of losing her best friend to rape and sets off for revenge. The film’s director, Emerald Fennell, recently weighed the much-discussed and deeply controversial ending where Cassie finally faced her friend’s rapist and got the upper hand only to be overwhelmed.
“The thing about Cassie is that she’s meticulous and smart. And she, like I would, like any woman, knows that when she goes into the cabin [where the villain resided] and she will go into the cabin with a gun – which she has never done before – chances are something will go wrong. She has a contingency plan in case something goes wrong, but she’s also so angry and determined to see him and him and again it’s an addicting cycle with Cassie. And the thing about the spiral it’s under is that, like any addictive spiral, it gets things faster and faster and closer and closer and behavior more and more extreme. And I think that she somehow avoided this because she knows that there is a likelihood that she will make a mistake, and the mistake she makes is that she is not tightening the handcuffs enough. “
While it’s a time-honored tradition in movies to show that the heroine is temporarily overwhelmed by the villain, which is what made the end of Promising young woman so divisive was the fact that (SPOILERS!) Cassie not only falls into the hands of the villain, but that he also murders her and disposed of the body.
Even though Cassie came up with a backup plan that ensured the villain was jailed for his crimes, the fact that the protagonist died so brutally has become a sore point for fans. According to Fennell, while it’s understandable that audiences want Cassie to triumph, there was no realistic way to end the film that would have resulted in a happy ending for the character.
“I think that if Cassie had murdered everyone and then went to jail for the rest of her life and lived with this horror, there was certainly the other end for me. There was no happy ending for this movie. All there is, is someone who has to show socialmediagossips to ensure justice. And it does, but at a very, very high cost. I didn’t believe that a woman of Cassie’s size could physically overwhelm a very strong man. And it was important that it challenged the myth of the vengeance.
Promising young woman has promising Oscar prospects. Script and co-production by Emerald Fennell, Promising young woman With a main cast consisting of Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, and Laverne Cox. This message comes from Collider.
Topics: Promising young woman