Under The Bed
The Monstrous Point of View of Promising Young Woman
There are a lot of frames in the scene just before the shocking death of Cassie, our protagonist in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman. She sits in her car, she gets out of her car, she takes off her shoes, she opens her boot, she hides her key, she looks at the house lit up in the distance, and she begins to walk up the driveway towards it, as menacing strings play a warped Toxic to soundtrack her descent upon the bachelor party inside.
She knocks on the heavy door, her back to us. Someone opens it, looks her up and down, and gleefully lets her in. We don’t see her face before the door closes behind her. The strings are heavy. It’s like Jaws is circling.
Without realising it, the men at the bachelor party have just welcomed a vampire into their house. Under the costume of the sexy nurse stripper, is a demon. She is there to torture them all, to feed off their pain, but they don’t know it.
The film makes a villain out of its protagonist, which is timely, considering lots of society’s upheld norms about leaders are being subverted. Who would have thought- men at the top of their game across every kind of industry, despicably abuse the people without any power in it. Remember when we used to trust priests, and Scout leaders, and presidents?
The first time we’re shown the monster inside Cassie, is when she is passing out on Jerry’s (Adrian Brody) bed, after he has taken her home from the bar and poured her a giant drink, encouraging her to swallow it down, even though her eyes are barely open. We watch as he removes her underwear, sliding down her body, while she mumbles, “What are you doing?”
Jerry breathes heavily with his face between her knees. Suddenly, her eyes are wide, and they’re looking at us. “What are you doing?” She says again, clearly this time.
The next time we see her it’s morning, and she walks home eating a hotdog in bare feet, red sauce dripping down her arm. She is catcalled by construction workers across the road, and she pauses, turning to look at them. It’s unsettling, seeing her from across the road, like the waiting dead from It Follows, and the men quieten down, then scamper away, all mad.
Cassie is the villain that maybe you weren’t sure you should be rooting for. You weren’t sure, because of misogyny, by the way, and you weren’t sure, because in the darker scenes of Promising Young Woman- the ones that take place outside the pastel palace of Cassie’s parents’ house, or the cream cake coloured coffee shop where she works- outside in the real world, the film is tonally closer to Gone Girl than is all that comfortable.
We experience the same blurring of victim and villain that comes from a person who does bad things because bad things were done to them. Both films unearth a discomfiting perspective, in that we don’t usually see evil women being turned that way. Couldn’t tell you why but perhaps we all assume they’re born with it.
But we should have guessed that the film never wanted us to empathise with Cassie entirely. From its opening moments, when we watch the slowly gyrating bodies of men, dancing to the tune of a Charli XCX song, blissfully unaware of what’s out there. They just see a drunk woman sliding down a couch. With heat-seeking focus on moving body parts, beer bellies, flaccid neckties, as the fetishistic Boys plays in the nightclub, the movie makes fun of us for having probably sought validation from men like this at some point in our lives. The film is warning us that it sees men the same way Predator stalks his prey in the forest.
Then again, Promising Young Woman doesn’t actually have to do that much in order to be as menacing as any serial killer thriller. Cassie hunts “nice guys,” and the only terrifying thing she does is to them describe the situation from their own point of view. You thought I was drunk, and you wanted to fuck me. Now that you know I’m not, you don’t.
The film gives iconic nice-guy actors the piddliest, weeniest little roles, and yet the impact each has within the story is like a bomb, politely exploding in your hands. The violence they enact upon women is seedy and underhanded, while the violence enacted upon them is done by tearing the fabric of pretense away from a reality that lets them get away with it. It isn’t until Cassie makes her threats against Al (the inspiration of her whole drunk-girl-at-the-bar routine) inescapable, that he must ‘defend’ himself against her in the only way she knows he knows how.
Without the vanity streak that compels Amazing Amy’s agile revenge planning, Cassie isn’t motivated by the same determination to survive in order to see a punishment through. Instead, she gives herself entirely to the cause, her own murder the only way to prove that she was right all along. Taken to its extreme, the determination to prove a point results in Cassie’s very real, very long death.
So we won’t say she’s sympathetic, heading towards the destruction of her little patch in the world. We won’t try to understand her as a character, because she was only ever half a person anyway. We won’t give her the antihero’s benefit of the doubt, because she would smirk and call that unrealistic. We’ll just call her what she is: the monster of her own movie, and agree that it’s probably the safest place to be.
