By the time Promising Young Woman reaches its climactic showdown, it’s hard to imagine what a satisfying ending might even look like.
A triumphant ending would seem too easy, for a film that’s otherwise been unafraid to explore messy and painful truths. A defeated one might seem too cruel, reinforcing the very disposability of female victims that the film has been railing against.
So writer-director Emerald Fennell threads the needle by doing both, or neither, depending on how you look at it. Cassie gets to have her say with Al (Chris Lowell), the man who raped her best friend Nina years ago, but is killed by him in the ensuing struggle. But then, it’s revealed that Cassie had laid one final trap, ensuring evidence of Al’s crimes would be sent to the authorities in the event of her disappearance. The film ends with Al being taken away in handcuffs at his own wedding.
It’s a shocking, potentially divisive ending — and, in retrospect, it feels like the only one that makes sense for the story Promising Young Woman is telling.
By this point, we’ve seen enough of Cassie’s revenge quest to know that even a perfect execution of her plan to confront Al (and apparently carve Nina’s name into his skin as a reminder of what he did) was unlikely to bring her the closure and comfort she so desperately needs. She might see herself as a woman on a mission to right the wrongs perpetrated against Nina and women like Nina by Al and men like Al, but it’s also clear she’s self-destructing from anger and grief.
She can’t move on, though Nina’s own mother (Molly Shannon) begs her to. She derives some savage satisfaction from spooking the men who take her home night after night, when she pretends to be blackout drunk in bars. But if those encounters force these men to reconsider their actions for the moment, they also confirm to Cassie, over and over again, that the world is exactly as horrible as she believes it to be, full of men who see themselves as “nice guys” but have no qualms about raping a woman given the opportunity.
Image: Focus Features
Meanwhile, her four-part agenda to strike back at the specific individuals she blames for Nina’s rape (and subsequent death by suicide) only reaffirms that most of these people don’t feel all that bad about what happened, if they remember it at all. The one time she encounters true remorse, from a lawyer (Alfred Molina) who defended Al, she’s taken aback, unsure of how to respond. It appears never to have occurred to her that someone might actually express guilt and regret about the role they played in the tragedy.
For a brief, awful moment, it seems Cassie might end up just another female body sacrificed for the sake of some dude’s supposedly bright future.
Still, none of this is enough to fix the real problem. What Cassie’s really up against is an entire culture of beliefs and procedures that protect predatory men at the expense of female victims, who get dismissed as dishonest or crazy. It’s why she takes out her fury not only on Al, but on the friend (Alison Brie) who dismissed Nina’s story, and the college dean (Connie Britton) who swept it under the rug, and the bystander (Bo Burnham) who cheered Al on — not to mention the countless anonymous men who try to take advantage of her in bars and even the random driver who hurls misogynistic insults at her in a fit of road rage.
It’s as if, having seen what happened to Nina at the hands of the “nice” people they knew, Cassie’s had a Magic Eye moment of seeing the whole world differently, and realizing for the first time that the monsters have been lurking in plain sight. There’s only so much Cassie can do to change that, no matter how thoroughly she throws herself into her “avenging angel” role, and Promising Young Woman resists the temptation to present otherwise.
When Al kills Cassie, suffocating her under a pillow, it comes as a shock. Surely she’ll find a way out of this, we think — and then, as the scene lingers long past the point where Cassie might have just been holding her breath, Surely this is some kind of trick. But it isn’t. Like Cassie herself after Nina’s death, we’re left stunned that this woman we’ve come to care about has had her life snuffed out, and horrified that the man who did it might get away with it. For a brief, awful moment, it seems Cassie might end up just another female body sacrificed for the sake of some dude’s supposedly bright future.
Image: Focus Features
Only after, as Cassie’s contingency plan kicks into place, are we allowed some of the simpler pleasures of a revenge narrative — the heroine getting the last laugh, the bad guys getting what’s coming to them. It’s reassuring to see Al arrested, his friend/accomplice (Max Greenfield) run for the hills, and Cassie’s shitty ex Ryan (Bo Burnham) sweat bullets upon receiving a series of scheduled texts from her. We can leave the movie pleased that justice will be served, at least in this case.
But it’s not really the end, even if Cassie’s final messages to Ryan promise it is. Even as that conclusion puts a tidy bow on Cassie’s narrative, it ties into another’s.
In another part of town, Gail (Laverne Cox), Cassie’s coffee shop coworker and only friend, finds in the cash register a broken-heart necklace engraved with Cassie’s name — the other half of the one with Nina’s name that Cassie had been wearing throughout the movie, and that was around her neck when she died. What Gail does next, we can only imagine; it doesn’t seem likely she’ll take up a single-minded revenge quest like Cassie did for Nina, though who knows.
Regardless, the necklace serves as a tangible proof that Cassie existed, that she mattered, that she loved and was loved. For Cassie, the “Nina” necklace was a token of a friendship cut short. For Gail, the “Cassie” necklace could be the same. The broken heart becomes a bittersweet reminder of the fact that violence against a woman doesn’t stop with that woman — the pain radiates outward to touch those who cared about her. Cassie kept Nina’s memory alive long after the rest of the world seemed to move on. Now that Cassie’s gone, Gail, and others who loved her, will do the same.
Promising Young Woman is now streaming on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and more.