"Promising Young Woman" by Emerald Fennell (2020)

Yay, after eight months of forced lockdown, cinemas are opened again. I have faithfully supported cinemas and was paying my monthly membership because I felt its the right thing to do - many of us did it and everybody I spoke to did very much same thing, we felt that we have to keep empty cinemas going otherwise there will bot nothing to return later. And the very first movie I wanted to see was  "Promising Young Woman" with a very interesting trailer and some positive buzz around it + there was a slight scandal with Variety critic questioning is the main actress hot enough to play this role. (It backfired on him)

After the movie, I just love going for a drink with my cinema-pal and discussing what we have just seen - for me this is the best part of the whole ritual, we go carefully over everything and give it our own rating. She is a bit younger so I explained to her that there is already a long tradition of female psychopaths: from "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" and "Fatal Attraction" to "Single White Female" and "Misery" (where Kathy Bates won "Oscar") and sweet faced Carey Mulligan is up there with the best of them: just like a genuine psycho, she can switch between sweetness and utter disdain. There is a scene where she walks in the street and some guys are catcalling at her - she stops and just stares at them, long enough to make them feel uncomfortable and alarmed. 

Strangely, the movie is advertised as "black comedy" and I strongly oppose that stupidity - its even insulting to call it a comedy because it is a very dark psychological thriller with a extremely serious theme, so calling it a comedy misses the point completely. Unless you are one of those people who think that "boys will be boys" and "girls get what they deserve" - which is what this movie is all about. 

Its about how we are condition to accept that boys are not to blame because bad girls made them misbehave and this maddening, perpetual excuse how we "can't ruin guys life because of some girl" - this kind of thinking goes on forever and it just shows how deeply ingrained it is in everybody's way of thinking. Mulligan lives a double life here, daytime selling coffee is a little coffee shop, evenings hunting the bars and pretending to be dead drunk, where guys take her home and try to abuse - she is extremely scary once she reveals that she is not drunk at all. There is a very clever idea of casting fresh-faced guys as all these nasty men, just to enlarge our perception of what we think of "good guys"  and "bad girls" who were asking for trouble. I thought it was brilliant how it forces the audience to look at their own hypocrisy and face that its not so easy if it happens to your own sister or daughter.