Promising Young Woman · reception & legacy

2020 · Emerald Fennell

How Promising Young Woman has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

It detonated out of Sundance 2020 as the awards season's biggest lightning rod, winning Emerald Fennell the Original Screenplay Oscar — but the instant-classic glow has since curdled into something more contested, and it's now the standard exhibit in arguments about whether the #MeToo-era revenge movie ever really worked.

What's debated

The ending: five years on, film Twitter and Letterboxd still relitigate whether it's a devastating subversion of the rape-revenge genre or a cop-out dressed as one.

Its footprint

The string-quartet cover of Britney Spears's 'Toxic' and the pharmacy singalong to Paris Hilton's 'Stars Are Blind' (which delighted Hilton herself) gave the film a pop afterlife, and its pastel candy-colored revenge aesthetic — rainbow wig, 'nurse' look — became an instantly recognizable, much-costumed image.

Where it stands

A true Letterboxd house-divided film — massively logged, half-starred and five-starred with equal fervor — making it less a settled classic than the 2020s' reference point for 'divisive on purpose.'

★ Did you know? Variety appended a rare formal apology to its Sundance review after critic Dennis Harvey implied Carey Mulligan was miscast — musing that producer Margot Robbie might have suited the role — and Mulligan publicly called it out as reducing the part to how an actress looks.

Named by the director

Influences Emerald Fennell has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

To Die For (1995) — Fennell cited Gus Van Sant's candy-coated satire as a touchstone for wrapping something poisonous in a bright, seductive package.
American Psycho (2000) — Fennell named it among the darkly comic films that shaped the movie's needle-threading of horror and humor.
Pedro Almodóvar — Fennell pointed to Almodóvar's heightened, color-saturated melodrama as a model for the film's stylized, allegorical look.