Do We Still Have a Place for Rape Revenge Fantasies?
Carey Mulligan’s ‘Promising Young Woman’ debuts in a culture that’s taking a colder attitude toward survivors’ rage
When the trailers for Promising Young Woman arrived last spring, they were greeted with celebration. The movie looked amazing. The script, by Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, had already earned a ton of industry buzz. And the premise — a sadistic young woman (played by Carey Mulligan) hunts down and torments the people involved in an old college rape case — was impossibly well-aligned with the ethos of the #MeToo era. This was the story of an enraged woman taking down men who had been living consequence-free for too long.
Now, after a series of Covid-19-related delays, Promising Young Woman is getting its theatrical release next week. Yet the once-massive hype around it has seemingly died down to a murmur. Reviews are, for the most part, positive, but one can also hear in some of them a certain polite weariness with rage and revenge. Meagan Navarro at Consequence of Sound gives the movie high points for style yet also writes that it is “about scorching the earth in hopes of decimating anything and everything under the broad range of rape culture, rather than precision.” She concludes that the movie’s “rape culture talking points”…
