Promising Young Woman: A Feminist Read on This “Feminist” Film

“Every week, I go to a club, and every week, I act like I’m too drunk to stand. And every fucking week, a nice guy like you comes over to see if I’m okay,” this was the line in the trailer of Promising Young Woman that stuck with many critics before they even saw the film (Fennell). When the trailer for this film first came out, a lot of women were excited to see it because it looked like a revenge film where men were the only ones targeted, especially the men that are classified as “nice” guys. Officially, the film is classified as a rape revenge film, which is where women get their revenge on their rapists or the people who sexually assaulted them. Rape revenge films are seen by the public as thrillers because it offers “the fantasy that after an assault there can be a clear and gratifying course of action; that female wrath, undeterred, can restore something by taking something; and that there exists not only a commensurate level of pain to inflict, but that the wronged can inflict it” (Siddiqi). So, in a world where women are always trying to avoid the violence of men, this looked like the kind of film that would make women feel powerful because they were not the victims for once. Which is one of the main reasons why so many women wanted to see this film, the trailer showed a world where women can get their revenge on their attacker and win in the end.

However, once the film was finally released after a delay due to COVID, the film produced a lot of mixed feelings. After seeing the film, some film critics saw this film as an empowering feminist film that has a powerful message. While other film critics saw the film as an extremely traumatic film, that gave a negative message to women and survivors of sexual assault/trauma. The reason why a lot of film critics found the film to be traumatic was because of the ending of the film. The ending, which is seen as being extremely controversial, has a very triggering scene that would be harmful to those who have survived physical/sexual assaults. It also did not help that a lot of critics thought the film was going to be something completely different after watching the trailer. The trailer was misleading and tricked people into coming to see the film, a film they probably would not have seen if they knew what was going to happen from the very beginning. The trailer painted the film out to be this strong feminist movie about a woman finally getting the revenge every woman wants on harmful men; however, just like how the main character tricks her targets, the film is just pretending to be a feminist film to trick others.

The film follows Cassie Thomas, as she goes on a journey to enact revenge against her friend’s rapist, Al Monroe, and every bystander while he got away with the act. While getting her revenge, the film makes sure to focus on Cassie’s trauma over what happened to her friend, Nina, and how helpless she felt in helping her recover from her sexual assault. This is shown by her need to get revenge at any cost for Nina, resulting in her doing things that appear very unethical and messes with people psychologically. The main thing Cassie does is “she goes to bars, pretends to be drunk, and confronts men who consider themselves gallant by ‘rescuing’ her while really attempting to take advantage of her, manipulating those who failed to believe Nina or discipline her rapist” (Hanson). Cassie starts her revenge by targeting Madison McPhee, a student who did not believe that Nina got raped and said Nina did it to herself by getting drunk. So, Cassie asks Madison out for lunch, gets her super drunk, then hires a man to take Madison to a hotel room. Madison wakes up in the hotel room, scared that the man might have taken advantage of her, and Cassie would not tell her anything about that day until closer to the end of the movie.

Cassie’s next target was Elizabeth Walker, the dean of their college who dismissed Nina’s case because she “had to give him the benefit of the doubt” (Fennell). When Cassie met up with Dean Walker, she made the dean believe that Cassie dropped off the dean’s teenage daughter at a drunk fraternity. The dean freaks out thinking the worst will happen to her daughter at the fraternity. After she freaks out about her daughter and apologizes for what happened with Nina, hoping Cassie would tell the dean where her daughter was. Cassie eventually admits that her daughter is safe and that she left her at a diner. Before Cassie leaves the dean alone after getting her revenge, she tells the dean that her daughter is not the brightest but “who needs brains? They never did a girl any good” (Fennell). Then, Cassie’s last victim before she goes after Nina’s rapist, she confronts Al’s lawyer, Jordan Green. Jordan harassed Nina into dropping all the charges against Al after the rape happened, which meant she never got justice for what Al did to her and Al got to live with no consequences. When Cassie went to see Jordan, she was ready to make him pay, but she was not expecting him to be expecting her. “No use hiding from the piper. He has to be paid,” this was what Jordan told Cassie as soon as she sat down in his home (Fennell). For the last few years, Jordan has been consumed with guilt for all the girls he has harassed in the past for his job, and it led to him having a nervous breakdown in the last few years. He was ready to face any punishment for what he has done, ready to receive whatever punishment Cassie was going to give him, but instead Cassie forgives him since he showed true remorse over what he has done. The only people that received any form of punishment from Cassie’s hands were Madison and Dean Walker, while Jordan Green walked free.

All of them deserved punishment for what happened to Nina, yet the only ones that were punished were the two women. Madison and Dean Walker are shown to be the only ones to get retribution from Cassie, which showed that two women get punished more than the men that did the crime and the men that help him get away with the crime. That is not to say those two women were not at fault for what they did to Nina, but for a film that was supposed to be about targeting “nice” guys, women seem to get hurt more throughout this film. The audience sees these two women get punished, yet they never got to see any of the men who do wrong in this film punished the way the audience wanted them to be punished. From the very beginning of the film, the audience was expecting for the men to be punished on screen by Cassie, however, they only get a little spooked from their encounter with Cassie and can walk away from it. Cassie’s encounter with the women has them feeling full blown terror, terror that is going to stick with them forever. The audience wanted the men of the film to feel that full blown terror, to feel the way women feel with the fear of being attacked hanging over their head. Instead, the audience must assume that all the punishment for these men is happening off screen, since it is never seen on screen. The closes thing to a punishment a man receives in this film is at the end, when Al is arrested for the murder of Cassie Thomas. However, since it is at the end of the film, it does not guarantee that the punishment is successful and leaves the audience wondering if Al is going to get away with it. Feminism is all about fighting for equal rights of all genders, which means it should have equal representation for everyone. To say a film is feminist while only showing women getting punished on screen and showing the aftermath of the punishment, while the men’s punishment is shown off screen and the audience never see the aftermath, is a little hypocritical. Especially, when Cassie’s whole journey is supposed to be about punishing men that take advantage of women who cannot defend themselves.

Cassie’s journey started because of the trauma she suffered through when she could not help Nina, making Nina the whole reason for Cassie’s revenge journey. However, Nina is never shown once throughout the whole film, except for pictures from childhood. There is no flashback with Nina, no voice over, and no scene where she explicitly tells Cassie to get revenge for her. Nina, the whole reason why this film exists, is never given a voice to talk about her own trauma and pain. The audience never gets to learn who Nina really was, they only know about her from what Cassie has said and what other people have said about her when Cassie brought up her rape. Cassie is getting revenge for a person that does not feel like a person to the audience because the audience will never know who she really is, they just must trust Cassie’s word for it. Even though this movie is about Cassie and her journey through grief, the person she is going on this journey for is never there:

In her grief, Cassie becomes Nina and Nina becomes Cassie. Nina has no real identity outside of Cassie because Cassie would not share her identity with the audience, making Nina’s story into Cassie’s story. While it is not a bad thing that the film was about Cassie and her grief, it still erased a sexual assault survivor’s pain, just so she can be used as a plot device to move the film along. This was a film that was about getting revenge for a female sexual assault survivor, yet it erased her voice and kept her story from being told in her own words. Even though Cassie “wants Nina’s absence to reverberate for everyone who’s implicated in her assault and the aftermath,” in her journey for revenge she unintentionally erases Nina as a person and silence her voice, making Cassie just as bad as the people who hurt Nina (Harris). Even though Nina was the catalyst for the whole film, Cassie’s voice is the loudest, all so she can get her final revenge on Nina’s rapist.

After finding out from Madison that there was a tape of Nina’s rape and watching it, Cassie decides it was time to finally get the justice Nina deserved. Cassie dressed up as a stripper, crashed Al’s bachelor party, drugged all his guests, and handcuffed Al to a bed. Once Cassie has Al captive, she made him remember her, but she specifically made him remember Nina:

Cassie wanted to carve Nina’s name all over Al’s body, so he can never forget her, no matter how hard he tried. Al refused to let her do that, so as he struggled in his handcuffs as Cassie came closer to him, he broke out of one of the handcuffs that kept him restrained. In the fight to stop her from carving him up, Al got the upper hand. He was able to put a pillow over Cassie’s face and put all his weight on her to stop her from moving, so she would not be able to hurt him. While Cassie is struggling and gasping for breath, Al continues to place his weight on her while yelling repeatedly things like stop moving. Eventually, Cassie does stop moving. The audience had to sit through Cassie’s gasps of air, her cries of pain, and her whimpering until she stopped moving under the pillow, waiting for her to get out of this situation, but she never does. After two and half minutes, Cassie stops moving for forever, while the audience waits to see if she was faking it “because so much of the film hinges on plotty misdirection” (Machado).

At this moment, a lot of people thought that Al was going to get away with everything, from raping Nina to murdering Cassie, and he would get to live happily ever after with his new wife. However, the movie ends with Cassie going through with one more plan. She left instructions for Jordan Green on what to do if Cassie disappeared, she told him where she was going and what to tell the police if she does not return. Green put Cassie’s plan in action, which meant the film ended with Al being arrested and Cassie’s scheduled text to her ex-boyfriend saying “you didn’t think this was the end, did you? It is now. Enjoy the wedding! Love, Cassie & Nina *winking face emoji*” (Fennell). The film ends with Cassie getting her revenge, she just had to die at the end for it to happen. The film started with a traumatized victim who wanted to get revenge on her friend’s rapist, and it ends with a dead traumatized victim who kind of gets revenge. Cassie is not triumphant or empowered after her revenge because she died for it and never got to see if it worked. This is the main reason why the film is considered controversial and why so many critics did not like the film. The heroine dies an agonizing, slow death, all for a revenge that she never gets to see fulfill, making her the loser in the end. Her dying made the whole journey of revenge feel like a giant waste of time because it is implied that Cassie knew she was not coming back from that bachelor’s party, and she was ready to die for her revenge. While the film does show that patriarchy protects men until the very end, no matter what harmful thing those men have done before, the film also shows that to beat the patriarchy, a woman has to die in order to get an already guilty man arrested.

After critics saw the film, they wondered if that truly was the only way for Cassie to get her revenge, if there was a way for her to get her happily ever after while still getting her revenge. When asked about this ending, Emerald Fennell stated that there was no other ending for Cassie, “even if she had carved Nina’s name all over [Al’s] body and maimed him horribly, then she goes to prison. What’s the happy ending for her, going into that place? There is none” (Geisinger). Cassie was doomed from the very start, she was never going to get her happy ending; no matter what happened to her, Cassie was going to suffer until the very end. By having Cassie’s story ending this way, it made a lot of women feel numb and helpless, especially survivors of sexual assault. Many survivors of sexual assault did not like the ending, they found it to be very triggering and gave a bad message to survivors. To survivors, “Cassie’s death is a punch to the gut that says there is no hope for survivors” (McAndrews). A lot of survivors saw the end as a slap in the face because it implied that those who suffer trauma will never have a real happy ending; those with trauma will either have to suffer for the rest of their life or die to get away from all of their pain. For a film that was supposed to be about getting justice for a sexual assault victim, it ends up traumatizing sexual assault survivors more than empowering them. Especially since Cassie’s death scene was dragged out for two and half minutes, which confused a lot of viewers since that was such a specific amount of time. In some interviews, Fennell revealed that she made the scene two and half minutes long because that is how long it takes a woman to die from suffocation in real life. Fennell learned that horrible fact from her father-in-law, who was an ex-police officer, so he knew exactly how long it would take for a woman to die the way Cassie did. From the struggle of the fight to the sounds and the silence that came with Cassie’s death scene, adding the exact time it takes for a woman to die, made her death too realistic.

Survivors came to this movie in the hopes that they can envision a reality where men are punished for their crimes against women, instead they saw the heroine slowly suffocate to death with the same attention a pornographic film does for their sex scenes, making them relieve their trauma all over again. While Fennell made the decision to not show Nina’s rape scene at any point in the movie, whether that was out of respect for survivors, or she felt like it did not fit in the film, no one exactly knows. However, by showing Cassie’s death scene, it negates her effort in not having the rape scene. Cassie’s death scene is shot exactly like any violent sex scene would, in any forms of media. The camera made sure to pay special attention to Al, as he placed his whole weight on the pillow covering Cassie’s face, to make sure that the audience could clearly see the effort he is putting into killing her. It takes this cruel moment killing this traumatized woman and makes it have a sexual element to it by filming it like a sex scene. By filming the scene like a sex scene, it makes just as brutal as it would have been if Fennell put Nina’s rape scene in. If Fennell did not put Nina’s rape scene in the movie to spare the trauma and triggers that survivors would have while watching it, she failed to realize that Cassie’s death was just as traumatizing and triggering to watch. Fennell said it was important to watch as Cassie suffocated to death because it showed the tragedy of real life, that women, like Cassie and Nina, do not always make it out alive because of men like Al. It is important for people to acknowledge the tragic reality that a lot of woman face, however, people watch films to escape reality and survivors watch rape revenge films to imagine a different realty. Survivors watch rape revenge films to watch a woman achieve her vengeance on her rapist/abuser while still getting to live another day, with the hopes of healing from their trauma after getting their vengeance. Cassie does not get that ending, instead she “is murdered at the hands of men and all of the frustration that has been building since the film’s beginning just sits in the viewer’s chest like an agonizing gas bubble” (McAndrews).

Not only did the ending tell survivors that they will never have a happy ending, but it also implied that the police are the true heroes that will get justice for sexual assault victims. The film ends with the police rushing to find Cassie’s remains and to arrest Al for her murder. The audience must assume that the police were able to convict Al of Cassie’s murder and finally got the justice that the audience has been asking for from the very beginning of the film. However, by implying that the police are always going to be the hero in these cases is harmful since “statistically speaking, cops are more likely to be assailant than resources,” especially in cases of sexual assault (Siddiqi). There are many stories of police officers dismissing cases of sexual assault or not taking the cases seriously. A lot of times police officers blame the victim for letting the assault happen in the first place, either blaming them for how they are dressed, how much they had to drink, or for leading their assaulter on. In real life, to survivors it feels like police officers only care about sexual assault cases when there is too much evidence to ignore the cases. Before people knew about Cassie’s death in the film, her disappearance was dismissed by police officers, they just assumed she ran away. Fennell even showed a detective in the film that did not really care about Cassie’s disappearance, until there was a strong possibility she was murdered. In the end, the police officers did not save Cassie and they do not ensure that the men who murdered her will get the punishment they deserved.

Even though there was a tape of Al raping Nina and that he murdered Cassie, there is still a very strong chance that Al and his friends will get away scot-free. Al Monroe and his friends are extremely wealthy, so “given the wealth and status of the men who are eventually arrested, one can assume they won’t spend much time in jail. And given the nature of her death, there’s plenty of precedent for it being excused as self-defense” (Siddiqi). There is no guarantee that Cassie’s murderer will receive the punishment that is truly deserves for hurting her and Nina. Just like in real life, even if there are loads of evidence against a man, especially in a sexual assault case, that does not mean justice is going to be served. In real life, wealthy men, like Brock Turner, are convicted as rapists; however, their sentence is never as long as it should be and then they get to live their life like nothing happened to begin with. Fennell wanted this film to show the harsh reality that women live in, so the audience can assume that Al probably gets away with everything he has done, since that is what happens in real life.

Promising Young Woman had so much promise and potential in being a great, feminist film. It could have been a film that gave survivors of sexual assault empowerment and showed them that a terrible thing might have happened to them, but they are more than their trauma. It could have started the conversation on how to dismantle the patriarchy that helps “nice” guys get away with the pain they inflict on woman. Instead, Fennell made a film that she claimed was a feminist film but was the opposite of a feminist film. The film had a misleading trailer that made audience believe that it was going to be a woman going on a murder spree and taking revenge on all the men that take advantage of defenseless women. This had more people, specifically women, come to see the film because they wanted to see a woman be in power and get back at the men who think they can do whatever they want. Instead, women saw a film where women were punished more than the men in film and most of the men’s punishment happened off screen, so the audience never got to see if they got what they deserved. Even in a film that was supposed to be for women, it still treated women differently from the men in the film because women get punished differently than men in the patriarchal society. Women get punished harshly, while men get a lighter punishment even if their crime was worse than what the woman did. Again, not to say the woman did not deserve to be punished for what they did in the film, they were just punished worse than any of the men were in the film. The trailer made viewers believe that the main purpose of the film was to punish those that hurt woman who went through a sexual assault, instead it erases the sexual assault victim’s voice.

Woman wanted to see a film where a woman of sexual assault finally got the justice they deserved, but instead the film silences the voice of the sexual assault victim, just to use them as a plot device to make the journey of revenge justifiable. Then, at the end of the film, the revenge felt like a waste of time since Cassie had to die in an extremely traumatic way to get Al arrested. By having Cassie die and saying that there was going to be no happy ending for her, Fennell essentially told those who suffer from trauma that there is no hope for them in being happy in life and maybe it is better if they die. Then, Fennell tried to have the film end perfectly with the police coming to arrest Al, but it never guarantees that everything that happened to Cassie worked. The audience never sees Al properly punished and it gives a message that police are always going to be the heroes that save the day with cases like this. The ending showed that the film was full of false promises, harmful messages to woman and sexual assault survivors, and implies that justice might not even be served, making the journey a waste of time. “Women are angry for good reason. They also deserve better movies than this one,” women deserve feminist films that empower them instead of traumatizing them (McIntosh).

Work Cited

Abraham, Raphael. “Promising Young Woman – Carey Mulligan Stars as a Toxic Avenger.” Subscribe to a Slice of the FT | Financial Times, Financial Times, 14 Apr. 2021.

Fennell, Emerald, and Margot Robbie. Promising Young Woman. Performance by Carey Mulligan, 25 Dec. 2020.

Geisinger, Gabriella. “Promising Young Woman’s Ending Is as Controversial as It Is Necessary.” Digital Spy, 16 Apr. 2021.

Hanson, Elise. “Promising Young Woman: Twist Ending Controversy.” ScreenRant, 29 Dec. 2020.

Harris, Aisha. “The Agony And Subversion Of The ‘Promising Young Woman’ Ending.” NPR, NPR, 21 Jan. 2021.

Machado, Carmen Maria. “How ‘Promising Young Woman’ Refigures the Rape-Revenge Movie.” The New Yorker, 29 Jan. 2021.

McAndrews, Mary Beth. “On the Disempowerment of Promising Young Woman: Features: Roger Ebert.” Features | Roger Ebert, 13 Jan. 2021.

McIntosh, Steven. “Promising Young Woman: Carey Mulligan Film ‘Deeply Troubling’.” BBC News, BBC, 26 Mar. 2021.

Otts, Brian L., and Robert L. Mack “Feminist Analysis.” Critical Media Studies: An Introduction, 3rd ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2020, pp. 139–153.

Siddiqi, Ayesha A. “Review: A Promising Young Woman.” Ayesha A. Siddiqi, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, 6 Apr. 2021.