Thirty-year-old Cassandra "Cassie" Thomas lives with her parents and works in a coffee shop after dropping out of medical school years earlier. At night, she visits bars pretending to be intoxicated, entrapping men to take her home before revealing her sobriety and confronting them. Cassie’s actions are motivated by the trauma of her best friend, Nina Fisher, who is thought to have been raped by their classmate Al Monroe while others watched and recorded the assault. When the university dismissed Nina’s complaint, she dropped out and later died by suicide. Wracked with guilt, Cassie abandoned her studies and dedicated herself to punishing those who exploit or ignore women.
During one of her shifts, Cassie reconnects with Ryan Cooper, a former classmate who is now a pediatric surgeon. He expresses interest in her, and after initial hesitation, Cassie agrees to date him. Ryan’s kindness appears to soften her outlook, and for the first time in years she begins to feel happy. When Ryan mentions that Al is soon to be married, Cassie’s anger resurfaces. She decides to confront those who enabled Nina’s assault and begins enacting a series of revenge plans.
Her first target is Madison McPhee, a former friend who dismissed Nina’s story and blamed her for drinking too much. Cassie invites Madison to lunch, gets her drunk, and arranges for a man to take her to a hotel room, letting her believe she was assaulted. Madison later leaves Cassie frantic voicemails, shaken by the experience. Cassie next confronts Dean Elizabeth Walker, who oversaw Nina’s case and dismissed it for lack of evidence. Pretending to be a talent scout, Cassie tricks the dean into thinking her daughter has been taken to the same dorm where Nina was attacked. When Walker becomes frantic, Cassie reveals her daughter is safe, forcing the dean to face her own indifference and misplaced trust in male students.
Cassie later visits Jordan Green, Al’s former defense attorney, intending to punish him for discrediting Nina. Instead, she finds him guilt-ridden and remorseful. He breaks down and apologizes, saying he has taken a leave of absence after suffering a breakdown over his past actions. Moved by his sincerity, Cassie forgives him. Soon afterward, she visits Nina’s mother, who pleads with her to let go of her anger and live her life, saying Nina would not have wanted Cassie to destroy herself in pursuit of vengeance.
Cassie resumes her relationship with Ryan, introducing him to her parents and beginning to heal. However, Madison later visits Cassie, distraught and regretful. She gives Cassie a phone containing the video of Nina’s assault, revealing that Ryan was present at the party and watched the attack. Heartbroken, Cassie confronts him. Ryan claims he was too drunk to remember and pleads for forgiveness, but Cassie refuses. Threatening to release the video, she coerces him into revealing the location of Al’s upcoming bachelor party.
Cassie disguises herself as a stripper and arrives at the remote cabin where the party is being held. After drugging Al’s friends, she handcuffs him to a bed and reveals her identity. Cassie tells him she plans to carve Nina’s name into his body, but Al breaks free and suffocates her with a pillow. The next morning, his friend Joe helps him burn Cassie’s body in the woods. Her parents later report her missing, and police begin investigating.
At Al’s wedding, Ryan receives a series of pre-scheduled messages from Cassie, indicating that she anticipated her death. The police arrive at the ceremony and arrest Al for Cassie’s murder as the guests look on in shock and Joe flees from the scene. Flashbacks reveal that before going to the bachelor party, Cassie sent Jordan Green a package containing the video of Nina’s assault, along with instructions to contact the police if she did not return. The authorities later find a half-heart necklace with Nina’s name among Cassie’s remains. As Al is taken away in handcuffs, Ryan receives one final text message from Cassie, signed “Love, Cassie and Nina,” confirming that her plan for justice is complete.
The film production crew deliberately chose male actors who previously played characters known as good or wholesome to reinforce the idea that predators can be anyone.[22] Fennell created "mood boards" to illustrate to the crew how Cassie has wildly different facets of her personality.[23]
In the first draft of the script, Fennell planned to end the film at the time Cassie's body was burned, but the production's financiers balked at having a negative ending. Prior to writing the script, Fennell initially considered an ending where Cassie appears at the wedding and kills the men responsible, but she deemed it unrealistic. She decided to have the ending where Cassie has a backup revenge plan as she felt Cassie would be thorough in her planning and she would be aware she could die. Additionally, Fennell stated that having Al apprehended at his wedding would reflect Cassie's sense of humor.[24] The production had a budget around $10million.[3][4]
In February 2019, Focus Features acquired distribution rights to the film for the world excluding Australia, New Zealand, the Benelux, Israel, Greece, Middle East, the CIS, and South Africa.[25] It had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 2020.[26] It was initially scheduled to be released theatrically on April 17, 2020,[27] but was pulled from the schedule due to the initial closures of movie theaters that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.[28] It was theatrically released on December 25, 2020, instead,[29] and on video on demand on January 15, 2021.[30][31] The Blu-ray was released on March 16, 2021.[32]
Reception
Box office
Promising Young Woman grossed $6.5million in the United States and Canada, and $12.4million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $18.9million.[5][6] Domestically, the film was released alongside Wonder Woman 1984, News of the World, and Pinocchio, and was projected to gross around $2million in its opening weekend.[33] It went on to debut to $719,305, finishing fifth at the box office. Some 63% of the audience were female, and 74% were aged over 25.[34] The film dropped 4.4% in its second weekend to $687,900, then made $586,285 in its third weekend, finishing sixth both times.[35][36] The film continued to hold well in the subsequent weekends, including seeing a 16% bump following its four Golden Globe nominations, with a running total of $5.1million by February 21.[37]
Promising Young Woman initially garnered strong critical acclaim. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a current approval rating of 90% based on 429 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The site’s critical consensus reads: “A boldly provocative, timely thriller, Promising Young Woman is an auspicious feature debut for writer-director Emerald Fennell — and a career highlight for Carey Mulligan.”[38] On Metacritic, the film holds a weighted average score of 72 out of 100 based on 48 critics, indicating “generally favourable reviews”.[39] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “B+” on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak gave it a 73% overall positive score, with 43% of respondents saying they would definitely recommend it.[34]
Critics praised Mulligan’s performance, Fennell’s direction and screenplay, and the film’s willingness to subvert the rape-revenge genre. Kate Erbland of IndieWire graded the film “B+” and wrote that it “twists its buzzword-laden, spoiler-free synopsis … into something fresh and totally wild.”[40]Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times observed: “The grimly multitasking finale … feels both audacious and uncertain of itself.”[41]Linda Holmes of NPR wrote: “Fennell is saying something here, too, about men — about nice men and about men who think they’re nice men, or nice enough men.”[42]
However, as the film’s public exposure grew, its ending, tone and feminist credentials became subjects of greater scrutiny. For example, a commentary in the Washington Post described the film as “polarising”, observing that while it functions as a “provocative feminist subversion of the rape-revenge genre”, it also “can’t decide whether it wants the audience to cheer for its heroine’s cleverness and pluck or worry about her mental and physical safety.”[43] A review in the magazine GQ noted that the film “has had a whole extra year to tease out audience expectations… now it arrives … with criticisms about under-whelming feminist credentials biting at its rear.”[44]
Reflecting its increasingly debated status, the film has been incorporated into academic and cultural discussions about post-#MeToo cinema and feminist genre revision. A 2024 article in Brief Encounters journal described Promising Young Woman as part of the “Feminist New Wave” of films that interrogate rape culture, positioning it as both “a gut punch disguised as lipstick” and a film whose “tone whiplash” and subversions are central to its ongoing reappraisal.[45]
Overall, while the film remains broadly well-regarded, its reputation has shifted from near–universal acclaim toward a more contested legacy: celebrated for its ambition and craft, yet debated for its tone, narrative choices and feminist impact.
↑ The film skipped a theatrical release in the United Kingdom and Ireland as a result of the closure of cinemas in April due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, through a partnership between sister companies Focus Features, Universal Pictures and Sky, the film was made available on April 16, 2021, on Sky's services Sky Cinema and Now as a Sky Original.[1]
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