Promising Young Woman (2020)

You can understand why I might not give this higher priority among the 2020 Best Picture nominees: A woman's life-changing trauma kicks off the story. Netflix is cagey about it, but as I suspected, the trauma is rape. Mercifully for us, we get no visuals of the event, which happens several years before the opening.

In modern Ohio, Cassie (Carrie Mulligan) has dropped out of med school after in-crowder Al (Chris Lowell) raped her then-drunk friend Nina in front of party guests and still didn't face any consequences from the law or the school. Nina has since died, possibly of suicide. Cassie's way of honoring Nina's memory is to play drunk at bars to lure men into taking advantage of her and then shock them with sudden sober behavior. By chance, she reconnects with classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham), who says that Al is engaged. Cassie begins a more targeted campaign of vengeance, but she needs time to decide how to feel about awkwardly seductive Ryan.

To call this a revenge fantasy is a stretch. Sure, some of Cassie's successes feel pretty unlikely, but she's no Sweeney Todd. Most of her actions are legal and amount to scaring would-be rapists and complicit people straight. She'll even forgive anyone who's already convincingly sorry. Only Al is slated for worse.

More importantly, Cassie doesn't have a good time of it for long. She dislikes her job as a barista. Her parents want her to move out now that she's 30. Few know why she stays out so late, and those who do, however close to her, don't approve. And things are about to get much worse for her. (It occurs to me that the references to The Night of the Hunter could be taken as a mark against her as well as her targets.)

I'm not sure how best to characterize the genre. The DVD menu screen suggests a thriller, as does the Wikipedia article, but it's rarely violent or anywhere close to scary. I've also seen it called a dark comedy, but the only remotely funny thing about it is the satisfaction of little victories against deserving foes. Mainly, I think of it as a drama. Almost a political drama, given the #MeToo timeliness. It certainly evokes a half-quiet anger that so few men and women who generally project decency will take sexual assault or allegations thereof seriously enough; most characters would rather blame alcohol, dismiss it as a common or long-ago occurrence, or just plead their own relative innocence.

I thought repeatedly of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. So why do I like PYW better? Simple: Cassie has a far more agreeable sense of justice. And for all her obsession with it, she doesn't act constantly bitter and unfriendly. I could almost see myself as her friend, albeit no more than that.

My misgivings were overly cautious. PYW is quite watchable once you accept the subject matter, in a film rated R primarily for language. I wish further succes on Oscar-winning writer and fledgeling director Emerald Fennell.