Tuesday, January 26, 2021

Film Review - Promising Young Woman (2021)

 Promising Young Woman is written and directed by Emerald Fennell and stars Carey Mulligan as Cassie, a once promising Med student who dropped out and now lives with her parents (Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown) and works in a coffee shop but the circumstances of her leaving medical school are never far from her mind and she is determined to close that chapter of her life for good.

 

Promising Young Woman is a movie that will rattle some for sure but it was one that I personally really enjoyed and first off Ms Fenell’s script and direction are excellent, there are many times where the storytelling takes a lot of twists and turns and goes from being a fun romantic comedy to a dark revenge thriller and not one time did it feel like a jarring shift in the tone and her direction with its bubble-gum like visuals are beautiful to look at on a nice cinema screen as at times like bubble-gum it is very sweet to look at but that illusion is ready to be burst at any time.

 

Secondly Ms Mulligan is simply the best I’ve ever seen her be in a movie, she is someone I have been hit and miss about over the years but here she delivers in a big big way, she understands Cassie and what drives her down to the bone and the way she is able to transform herself from being this young girl to a determined woman in one scene after another is just fantastic to see and so often its just in her eyes and her face, she will have some tough competition but I would love to see her nominated for this work.

 

Also the casting of the men in this movie is something I want to touch on briefly as Ms Fennell does a very interesting thing with it, she doesn’t cast these big football/baseball playing type of men in those roles they are guys who look more like the man next door, the type that would wave to you every morning or ask how your doing every once in a while and they have very young baby face type faces or are people who sure might have done bad things in university but it was a lifetime ago they’ve moved on and settled down but somethings things can’t just be like that and you move on the sins of the past will always find a way.

 

Lastly the jukebox soundtrack is really good at one point Paris Hilton starts playing and the way its played in the movie makes you want to dance along to it and there are some other songs that play in the film as well that are also very effective.

 

And so that was Promising Young Woman and it was well worth the wait with a truly great performance at the centre of it, 4 out of 5.

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