Sightlines · reception
How Promising Young Woman was received
2020 · Emerald Fennell · Promising Young Woman on Sightlines
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
- 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.