Empowering or Discouraging? The Misleading Marketing of “Promising Young Woman”

This article contains spoilers. It also contains mentions of sexual assault and suicide.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman premiered in 2020 and granted Fennell her first Oscar Award for Best Original Screenplay. Promising Young Woman follows Cassie as she seeks vengeance against men and justice for her friend, Nina, who has been severely affected by a rape she has suffered in the past. However, Cassie uses unorthodox methods of carrying out justice. She begins by threatening and scaring men who attempt to take advantage of her at bars to teach them a lesson. But Cassie’s ultimate goal is to exact revenge on Nina’s rapist. For this, Promising Young Woman has been praised for its unique take on the revenge genre. The film’s official trailer depicts scenes of Cassie as she sinisterly deceives men who have wronged women, framing Cassie as an empowered feminist figure. During the trailer, the phrases “a delicious new take on revenge” and “payback never looked so promising” promote the film. These lines characterize Promising Young Woman as a female-empowering revenge film, yet the ending of the film subverts expectations of the empowering revenge advertised.

Contrary to Promising Young Woman’s empowering advertising, the film’s conclusion is extraordinarily upsetting and disturbing. At the end of the movie, Cassie lures the man who raped Nina into an intimate situation, but when she begins to taunt him, he regains control and smothers Cassie to death. Cassie’s murder is shocking and evocative - the scene is framed to parallel a rape scene. This turn of events is jolting to an audience who is expecting Cassie to continue her streak of viciously outsmarting men; there was no question of her victory until this point. Previously, Cassie had acted as a vehicle of justice against male violence and this end to her life can be discouraging to audience members who feel they have been promised a story of revenge. Cassie’s violent death indicates that there is no end to the cycle of violence against women.

Promising Young Woman makes sense of this unrelenting male violence by establishing that it is enabled by a patriarchal society. Throughout the film, the experiences of men are privileged by the systems of power present. This can be seen most starkly in Cassie’s investigation into those involved in the case of Nina’s rape. Cassie questions individuals within the police department, her university, and her social group, all of whom all mishandled Nina’s traumatizing experience. The consequences of this mishandling were severe: Nina committed suicide afterward, motivating Cassie’s relentless path of vengeance. This inadequate response to sexual assault is reflective of American society’s propensity to give men the benefit of the doubt over women. Rather than ending the film with clean feminist revenge, Cassie’s murder acts as a criticism of the patriarchal system in which she exists.

However, the narrative is not over. After her death, the film has one final act in which Cassie does ultimately achieve some form of justice. Cassie had anticipated the likelihood of being killed by Nina’s rapist and she preemptively sent the police her location and new evidence of Nina’s rape that clearly incriminates him and his accomplices. Due to Cassie’s diligence, all those involved in the rape of Nina and in her own murder are arrested. While the film ultimately ends with justice, the final feeling is not one of empowerment as was suggested by the film’s marketing. Yet, this is not a misstep from the film’s marketing team, but rather an intentional and clever way to emphasize the film’s driving theme.

The messaging behind Cassie’s story is dark. Only after multiple women are dead is there any justice for the men who have assaulted them. Promising Young Woman promotes the idea that sexual assault does not matter in a patriarchal society where justice rarely occurs. The film suggests that extreme lengths must be taken in order for society to hold men accountable, and this message is discouraging. It is not the feminist revenge trope that was expected. Rather, the film offers a bleak take on American society’s treatment of sexual assault. Promising Young Woman achieves its goal of shocking and upsetting audiences through its subversion of the empowering narrative advertised in its marketing and narrative pattern. This discouragement works to create a commentary on the inadequate societal response toward men guilty of sexual assault. However, by shining a light on the inadequacies of America’s response to sexual assault, the film can be empowering to viewers who feel unheard in their criticisms of this broken system.