Promising Young Woman · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man is being kind. He has poured her into a cab, walked her up the stairs, put a drink in her hand she does not need. She is folded onto his couch with her legs splayed and her eyes swimming. He is explaining that he only wanted to make sure she got home safe. Then his hand goes somewhere it shouldn't, and her eyes come into focus. Level. Sober. It was always an act.

Hold that half-second. Everything Emerald Fennell built is inside it, and so is everything the arguments about her ending are really about.

Start with why the trap works. Deleuze, taking a cue from the logician C. S. Peirce, distinguishes a mark from a demark. A mark is an object that carries meaning through habit: when you see this, expect that. The drunk woman alone at closing time is one of the most heavily marked objects our culture has. Every man in the bar reads her instantly. So does the audience. A demark is what happens when the habit snaps, when an object refuses the chain it belongs to and you are forced to interpret instead of recognize. Cassie performs a demark nightly, as a job. And Fennell runs the same operation on us: she casts Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Max Greenfield, Sam Richardson — familiar affable men a hundred comedies have trained us to like — and lets their decency dissolve under pressure. The demark isn't only in the plot. Your own affection for a performer is the bait.

The posture matters as much as the reveal. In his second cinema book Deleuze describes a cinema of the body, where an attitude carries what dialogue can't, and he calls the loaded attitude a gest: a posture that exposes a social relation rather than illustrating a personality. Cassie's slump is a gest. It is not characterization. It is a diagram of a transaction, held still long enough to be read, and she wears it the way she wears her other costumes — cardigans, pastels, a manicure, the corporate suit, the nurse's scrubs. Nancy Steiner's clothes are not what Cassie is like. They are what she has learned the world will not look at twice.

Now the harder question: why is a film about rape shot like a cupcake?

Feminist criticism has spent decades arguing over whether the rape-revenge picture indicts the gaze it borrows or simply launders it. Fennell's answer is to make prettiness the weapon. But there is an older name for what she is doing, and it is Deleuze's least-quoted category, the one sitting between the close-up and the deed, in the region of appetite: the impulse-image, whose cinema is naturalism. Naturalist films run two worlds on top of each other. On top is the derived milieu, an actual furnished plausible place: an office, a bar, a pharmacy with rows of confectionery under fluorescent light. Beneath it is the originary world, which is not a place at all but a field of pure drive. The impulse-image is the instant the lower world tears through the upper one. Fennell's move is to make the crust as sweet as it can possibly be. Benjamin Kračun shoots in the grammar of romantic comedy and music video, glossy and symmetrical and high-key, pastel, hot neon. Michael Perry's pharmacy is candy. None of it is decoration. It is a surface being prepared for the tear, and the tear is always the same event wearing a different face.

Naturalist worlds also have a direction. Deleuze calls it the line of slope: entropy, an irreversible run downhill toward exhaustion and death. Cassie is on that line from the first scene. The medical prodigy who quit. The woman in her childhood bedroom. The nightly ritual that changes nothing and cannot stop. Colour keeps the score — affective colour, in Deleuze's sense of a hue that absorbs a scene and becomes its feeling. The palette curdles as the film descends, and by the bachelor party we are in a sickly desaturated green. The candy has run out.

Frédéric Thoraval's editing keeps one joint deliberately loose. Deleuze's term for an act that could belong to two different situations is an index of equivocity, and every sting is built on one: a hand on a leg is a pass or an assault depending on a fact the image cannot show you, which is whether she can say no. Fennell shoots that ambiguity instead of resolving it. It is why the scenes play as flirtation right up until they don't.

So what is Cassie? She stages fictions in order to produce facts. Deleuze's name for that figure is the forger: not a liar, but someone who makes truth rather than finds it, and who is never one person for long — drunk girl, corporate professional, nurse. Cassie is a forger with a notebook. This is the film's bleakest argument and it deserves to be taken seriously: forgery is the only evidentiary procedure she has left, because every institution built to establish truth declined. The dean dismissed it. The lawyer pressured the victims out of their statements. The classmate enabled it. Fabrication is what remains when testimony has been made worthless.

Which brings us to the ending everyone fought about. Rape-revenge, from I Spit on Your Grave forward, is pure action-image: a situation presses on a person until she acts, and the act transforms the situation. Fennell quotes that architecture precisely so she can withhold its payoff. What she stages instead is what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image, a character who perceives everything and has no adequate act available. Cassie knows the perpetrator, the enabler, the dean, the lawyer. Nothing she can do touches any of it, so she is left with ritual: lessons, variations, a curriculum with no graduation. Then she is killed, and the retribution arrives anyway, by pre-scheduled evidence and text messages landing in the middle of Al's wedding. Deleuze separates two kinds of offscreen. The relative kind is the next room. The absolute kind is a beyond that cannot be located in any space and reorganizes the meaning of everything in the frame. Those messages come from an absolute out-of-field. There is no room she is in.

The debts are specific. Ms. 45 gave Fennell the avenger who weaponizes coded femininity as camouflage; Cassie's cardigan is Ferrara's nun costume. Thelma & Louise gave her the terminal ending in which defiance is foreclosed rather than crowned, and she extends that gamble by killing her heroine before the revenge lands. Death Proof gave her the reflexive posture: exploitation reclaimed with cool pop cues and authorial irony instead of leering. Gone Girl gave her the woman whose performed niceness is itself the weapon, plus the information management that meters out backstory as reveal. American Psycho gave her kitsch concealing rot and the needle-drop as satire.

What she added is a new idea about what revenge can be made of. Anthony Willis's slowed, string-drenched arrangement of "Toxic" is the whole method compressed into one cue, a disposable pop hook rebuilt as dread. And the ending converts retribution into information. The thing that finally reaches Al Monroe is not a knife. It is a document, sent on a timer. That an anti-cathartic inversion of an exploitation genre, shot in roughly twenty-three days by a first-time director, could take Original Screenplay and put the first British woman into the Best Director category is not awards trivia; it is the moment this mode became releasable at scale. LuckyChap's mandate, which later found its widest form in Barbie, has its hard early statement here.

Watch it again and read the pastel as crust. Watch the men's faces in the first ten minutes, before anything has happened. They are not villains arriving. They are the derived milieu, about to tear.