Promising Young Woman

Carey Mulligan in “Promising Young Woman” Focus Features photo via IMDB

It's no accident that relations between men and women have been described through the ages in terms of war. The war between the sexes, the never-ending battle. Martial and marital are practically the same word, easily confused with a few careless keystrokes.

Songwriters pen love songs, not lust songs, trying to put a wholesome, cheery face on what in reality is a hopelessly tangled hairball of emotions. When things go wrong, as they often do, it can result in what's called a broken heart. That's another euphemism; the real consequences range from stink-eye divorce settlements to tabloid headlines and political upheavals. (Et tu, Andrew?)

In a recent release from Lion's Roar – a Buddhist website that has me on its email list – a Burmese meditation master calls sex, “gross, base and disgusting.” I think it was Larry McMurtry who ventured that people without a sense of humor probably shouldn't even talk about the subject.

English actress/writer/director Emerald Fennell has a sense of humor … a sly one. She fires a provocative shot across the bow of the opposite sex in the black comedy thriller “Promising Young Woman,” another of my favorite contenders in this year's awards chase.

Carey Mulligan stars as Cassandra, who likes to go to bars and act like she's falling-down drunk, at least long enough for a stranger to pick her up and take her home. There he discovers – at his peril – that she's not what she seems.

Why? And how did Cassie go from being a leading student in her med-school class to working as a coffee house barista and living with her parents? Fennell's script of feminist revenge is a tantalizing maze of withheld information, revealed a few delicious little bits at a time.

Margot Robbie is one of the film's producers, and there's been speculation that she may have been eyeing the bombshell seductress role of Cassie for herself. But Mulligan has no trouble making it her own, adding layers of nuance under the sardonic sense of humor and deeper contradictions in Cassie's psyche.

Nice casting choices help make Fennell's dialogue crackle – Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown as her parents; Laverne Cox as her coffee-house owner;/co-worker; Maui Film Fest honoree Connie Britton as a college dean with something to hide; Alfred Molina as a lawyer who becomes a linchpin in Cassie's plans; and the guys at the bars clueless enough to want to be her johns. The web will widen before she's through.

The brilliant if twisted scheme threatens to get derailed with the arrival of Ryan (Bo Burnham), Cassie's classmate in med school who went on to become a pediatric surgeon. Not only can he match her wit and gallows-humor, he seems to be a form of life not on her radar screen: a nice guy. Cassie's disposition changes so much in one giddy rom-com montage, you wonder if she's wandered into the wrong movie by mistake.

But not for long. The goal of Cassie's quest awaits inexorably, as the audience wonders how she can pull it off without getting ensnared herself. By now the morality of her actions is a moot point as the tension builds in the dangerous, shocking final reel.

Proving herself a promising young director, – and already a master of suspense – Emerald Fennell still has surprises coming, even after you think the story's over.