I used to feel the audience’s eagerness for me to be a Good Survivor™ with a happily-ever-after to give what happened to me meaning every time I told my story publicly. The groups I addressed varied, but whether they were incoming college freshmen, law students, fraternity brothers, or members of our military, they had similarities. For about six years, I spoke as a volunteer through my local rape crisis center. I understand Fennell’s unwillingness to tie the story up neatly in a bow. When do we get stories on screen that don’t absolutely crater us, supposedly in service to our cause? In any case, for all of Promising Young Woman’s merits, it still uses trauma and sexual violence to teach a lesson to the unenlightened, while telling actual survivors that the price of justice is our lives.
Unbelievable and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri both feature non-survivors who serve as avenging angels - in Unbelievable’s true story, they’re police detectives, while in Three Billboards, a victim’s grieving mother (Frances McDormand) is a fury, much like Cassie. Buoyed by research about trauma and actual campus sexual-assault cases, the show has a beloved following to this day. Fennell’s film isn’t peerless - five years ago, Sweet/Vicious broke this ground with a buddy comedy about two college students who become anti-rapist vigilantes. Or the supposedly feminist 2017 rape-revenge flick Revenge, with its heavy use of the male gaze. Or Red Sparrow’s glee in tormenting Jennifer Lawrence’s character for titillation. To be clear, Promising Young Woman is light years ahead of, say, Game of Thrones, which focused not on a victim, but on a male bystander. But at what point do survivors deserve less traumatic storytelling? When do we get to see a better world, one where people living with trauma get to heal, fall in love, seek justice, or just plain live? How long do we have to keep being object lessons for other people about our own pain?
#Jumpcut rape revenge movie
For me, it would be an enormous injustice to be so honest the whole way through this movie and then have a Hollywood ending that also let us all off the hook.” The cops show up at Al’s wedding to arrest him for Cassie’s murder, but she has to die to make them care. In the film’s finale, Nina’s rapist, Al (Chris Lowell), kills Cassie and burns her body, unaware that she’s already pre-arranged for the evidence against him to reach the police. As a sexual-assault survivor myself, I recognized so much of myself in the way Cassie becomes obsessed, self-sabotages, takes undue risks, compartmentalizes herself into her days at the coffee shop and her nights on the prowl, and makes her life small and isolated. Cassie isn’t a sexual-violence survivor herself, but she carries her own trauma and survivor’s guilt as Nina’s best friend, who wasn’t there the night of the rape, couldn’t get justice for her, and then couldn’t save her best friend. I was on board for the story of Cassie, a medical-school dropout eking out a small-time nightly vengeance for her best friend Nina, who was raped in med school and later died, seemingly by suicide. The Girl Culture aesthetic is expertly applied, from the unabashed use of pop music usually labelled a “guilty pleasure,” like a Britney Spears cover and a Paris Hilton bop, to the soft pastel aesthetics of the protagonist’s daytime rituals. The casting of 2000s Nice Guys like Adam Brody (Seth Cohen from The O.C.) and two of Veronica Mars’ more emotionally healthy exes (Chris Lowell and Max Greenfield) seemed inspired.
So much of Fennell’s directorial debut is well-crafted. Fennell’s story looked like it was trying to break out of the old patterns. But Promising Young Woman appeared to be serving up something different. Beyond that, much of the storytelling is simply boring, relying on the same story beats, like using sexual assault to make an unpopular woman character more palatable. They frequently focus on how assault affects the male characters connected to the survivor, among other insulting tropes. Movies and television shows that address sexual violence are still too often retrograde and exploitative, used to shorthand an antagonist’s villainy or a hero’s motivation. The trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman teased a fresh story about sexual violence from an unusual and impressive angle.
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