Promising Young Woman, and What It Costs to Make Them Listen

A woman is slumped alone in a club, too drunk, by the look of her, to find her phone or to stand. A group of men nearby watch her, and one of them says the old thing about women like this: that they put themselves in danger. Another, the kind one, goes over to see if she is all right. He offers to get her home, takes her to his flat instead, and pours her another drink. Later, in his bedroom, when he has begun to do what he brought her there to do, she sits up and asks him, in a voice that is suddenly and completely sober, what he is doing.

That is how Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman begins, and the question holds the whole film in small. What are you doing? It is not a scream, and it is not a threat. It is a request for an account, put to men who have never been asked for one, and the only accounts they can give are descriptions of themselves. They are nice guys. They thought there was a connection.

The woman is called Cassandra, Cassie to the people who love her. In the Greek story, Cassandra was given the gift of true prophecy and cursed never to be believed; in its commonest telling, the curse was her punishment for refusing a god. Carmen Maria Machado, writing about the film in The New Yorker, saw how exactly the name fits: this Cassandra, she wrote, has the clarity and the prophecy of her namesake, and it is not her fault that no one is listening.

This essay reads Promising Young Woman as a film about hearing more than about revenge. Cassie’s closest friend was raped, and the people around that rape each had a way of not hearing it: a friend, a medical school, a lawyer, a room of classmates and, at the very end, the police. The film shows each of those ways as ordinary, and some of them as kind. What Cassie does, first in bars and then with the people who failed her friend, is to translate an account nobody would receive into the one language they cannot refuse, which is their own fear. That language works. The film never pretends it is free. Its subject, in the end, is what it costs the woman who speaks it.

It is a hard film to watch and a harder one to settle. Its ending divided critics and audiences, and still does. This essay will say where it stands, and it will set out, as fairly as it can, the case against.

The record first. Promising Young Woman was written and directed by Emerald Fennell, her first feature as a director, and stars Carey Mulligan as Cassie. Bo Burnham plays Ryan, Alison Brie plays Madison, Connie Britton plays a medical-school dean, Molly Shannon plays Nina’s mother, and Alfred Molina appears, uncredited, as a lawyer. It is an American and British production. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 25 January 2020 and opened in American cinemas on 25 December 2020. Fennell won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it, and the British Academy gave it its awards for original screenplay and for outstanding British film. It reached Japanese cinemas in July 2021.

Cassie Thomas is thirty. She left medical school years ago, lives with her parents and works in a coffee shop. At night she goes to bars and pretends to be too drunk to stand, and when a man takes her home and starts to take advantage of her, she drops the act and confronts him, sober. Her reason is Nina Fisher, her best friend since childhood. At a medical-school party, Nina was raped by a classmate, Al Monroe, while others watched and filmed it. The university dismissed her complaint. Nina left medical school, and later she took her own life. Cassie gave up medicine too.

The film never shows the rape, and this essay will not describe it. It was rape. The people in the film call it by other names, or by none, and that is part of what the film is about. The filming was part of the harm. It made a record that could be kept and watched again. It was sent round their classmates at the time, and years later it is still there, on a friend’s phone.

Then a former classmate, Ryan Cooper, now a paediatric surgeon, walks into the coffee shop and asks her out, and with him she begins, for the first time in years, to be happy. When Ryan mentions that Al is getting married, she sets out after the people who let it happen: Madison, a friend who blamed Nina for drinking too much; the dean who dismissed the complaint; the lawyer who defended Al. Nina’s mother begs her to stop and to live, and Cassie tries.

This essay discusses the whole film, including its ending, which is where the film makes its argument and which anyone who has not seen it may prefer to meet first. The ending has a section of its own further on, with a second warning before it. What the essay says about the film rests on its published record and on criticism and interviews of record, checked against the screenplay Variety published in full in 2021; where the screenplay and the finished film may differ, the film’s record is followed. Lines are paraphrased, never quoted as exact.

The bars first, because the film is so sure of itself there that it is easy to miss what they are for. Every week Cassie goes out in a different outfit, performs a drunkenness so complete that she can barely stand, and waits. It does not take long. The evening goes the way the first one went, a concerned man, a ride, another drink, and it ends with the same question. Afterwards she makes a mark in a notebook she keeps hidden under her childhood bed. The pages are full of them.

What the device shows is not that some men are dangerous. It shows who the dangerous men turn out to be. They are not strangers in an alley. They are the ones who come over to help. The film cast these parts with actors known for playing sweet, harmless men, and Linda Holmes, reviewing it for NPR, took the point: the film, she wrote, is saying something about nice men, and about men who think they are nice, or nice enough. The film’s quarrel is with that word. In its bedrooms, nice is not a fact about a man. It is a story he tells about himself, and the story does work. It lets him skip the one question that matters, which is whether the person in front of him is agreeing to anything at all.

She is not, and as far as he knows she cannot be. That is the plainest thing the film says, and it says it without a speech. A woman too drunk to stand cannot agree to what is being done to her. Being drunk is never a yes, and neither is being in his flat, or having accepted a drink, or not having said no. His belief that there was a connection is a fact about him. It tells us nothing about her. The film strips these scenes down until nothing is left in the room to argue about later. One question remains, and it works as a test: what does a man do when the woman in front of him cannot refuse? The men who fail it are the men who were sure they would pass.

It needs saying as plainly: this is a film’s device, a thought experiment given a body, and nothing in this essay suggests that anyone should try anything like it. The film is not naive about it either. Its whole last act turns on how thin the line was all along.

What she asks in those rooms is never why, or how could you, but what are you doing, and the men cannot answer it except by describing themselves. The rest of the film is about the people who were asked for an account of what happened to Nina, and who each had a way of not giving it.

Each of the people around the rape had a way of not hearing, and none of those ways looks like cruelty from the inside.

Madison was a friend. What she heard was a woman who had drunk too much, and she decided that Nina was crying wolf. That is the grammar of blame. It does not deny that something happened. It decides in advance what a certain kind of woman’s account is worth, and it lets the listener feel shrewd rather than disloyal.

The dean heard a complaint and found too little evidence. Her grammar is procedure: fairness to the accused, the benefit of the doubt, a situation in which it is one person’s word against another’s. Every one of those phrases names something real and worth protecting. In the film’s telling, used together, they did one thing: they made sure the account was never really weighed at all.

The lawyer was paid to hear it as a problem for his client. He discredited Nina and pressed her until she dropped the case. That is the grammar of the fee, which turns not believing her into a professional duty.

And the classmates were there. They watched, and laughed, and filmed. Their grammar is the party, a night that was, for them, a story to tell. Of all the ways of not hearing in the film, this is the one that needed no reasons at all.

Machado noticed that the word rape is never spoken in the film. What is spoken instead is the language that lets a room avoid it: what happened, the accusations, a bad choice, a situation in which it is his word against hers. The euphemisms are not decoration. They are how the not-hearing is done.

This Library’s essay “Sweden: The Law Stopped Asking Whether She Fought, and the Number Went Up” found that even a law built on consent cannot reach the room: the cases with no injury and no third party, in which someone must describe to strangers, months later, what happened, against a person who describes it differently. Nina’s case is the opposite one. The room was full of third parties, and one of them was holding a camera. The evidence existed. What was missing was anyone willing to hear it.

Once Cassie learns that Al is marrying, she goes after the people who did not hear. What she does to them is the film’s most uncomfortable material, and it is worth looking at closely, because it is not quite what the word revenge suggests.

She takes Madison to lunch, gets her drunk, and lets her believe, when she wakes in a hotel room, that she was assaulted there. Madison, who blamed Nina for drinking too much, is left not knowing what happened to her.

She makes the dean who dismissed Nina’s complaint believe that her own daughter has been taken to the room where Nina was attacked, and then tells her the girl is safe. The benefit of the doubt, which the dean gave so readily to a young man, does not survive the thought of her own daughter in that room.

This Library found the same turn in a Japanese drama. “A Restaurant with Many Problems, and the People Made Into the Problem” describes a department head who sees a wrong perfectly well once he imagines it done to his own daughter, and still will not stand up for the woman it was done to. The dean is given the imagining without being given a choice.

Neither of these is violence of the physical kind, and neither is a punishment in the ordinary sense. Each is a translation. Cassie holds an account that nobody would receive; Nina reported it, and it was not heard. So Cassie stops arguing and moves the listener into a place from which not hearing is no longer possible: her own fear, or fear for someone she loves. It is a language with one sentence, and the sentence is now you know.

It is also cruel, and the film lets it be. Justin Chang, reviewing it for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that it plays hard with our empathy and with our pleasure in other people’s comeuppance, as if the two were closely bound. The fear lands on people who did not rape anyone. Madison’s terror is real terror, and the dean’s fear is real fear. The film does not say whether the lesson was worth it. It leaves the question with us, which is where it belongs.

What makes the language unusual is how much of it is speech. Revenge in genre films has often had no need to be understood; the avenger Kaji Meiko played in Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion in 1972 is a silent one. Cassie never stops asking. What are you doing, she asks the men in the bars. She wants Madison to know what not knowing is like. She wants the dean to feel what she refused to imagine. At the end she will ask a man to say, in his own words, what he did. Her revenge is made of questions, and what it wants, every time, is an answer. That is why this essay calls it a language rather than a punishment.

Ryan is the film’s best trick, and its cruellest. He comes into the coffee shop, recognises her from medical school, puts his foot in his mouth and keeps coming back. He is funny and kind and in no hurry. For a stretch the film becomes a romantic comedy, down to a singalong to a Paris Hilton song, and Cassie, for the first time in years, is happy. She takes him home to meet her parents. Holmes wrote that his arrival opens the question of what happens when Cassie meets a man who might actually be nice after all.

Then Madison, distraught and regretful, brings Cassie a phone. On it is the video of Nina’s rape, and among the classmates in it is Ryan, watching. He tells Cassie he was too drunk to remember. He begs her to forgive him. She will not, and under the threat of the video he tells her where Al’s stag party is.

Ryan did not rape anyone. He watched. He is the film’s most exact picture of what it is about, which is not the man who does the harm but the room that lets him. And the film is precise about how a bystander is made. He was drunk. He was young. He had friends there, and a future. Each reason is small, and each is enough, because in a room full of people every one of them can assume that somebody else would have done something. Fennell has said of him, in effect, that he wants very much to be good, but not at the price of blowing up his own life.

Chris Frantz, in a 2024 academic article on the film, noticed a small thing in that scene. When Cassie shows Ryan the video, he pushes back as soon as he understands what he is watching again. In Frantz’s reading, that refusal to look is his way of disowning his part in it. It is the bystander’s reflex in miniature: not to deny what happened, but to decline to see it.

The film is careful here in a way that matters, and it is easy to read past. Its quarrel is not with men as such. Two of the people who failed Nina most completely are women, Madison and the dean, and the one person in the film who fully answers for what he did is a man. What the film goes after is a mechanism: a self-description, nice, that supplies an excuse in advance, and a room in which everyone can wait for someone else. Machado read the film as refusing its audience the comfort of a single good man, and thought the refusal right. This essay reads it a little differently. A mechanism is not a verdict on anyone’s nature. Anyone can see it, and anyone can refuse it, which is why the film holds to account the ones who did not.

The film’s choices about how women appear on screen are as deliberate as its casting of men. It opens on a dance floor, with the camera dwelling on the bodies of men in office khakis as they dance, the way films have long dwelt on women’s bodies. It is a joke, and it has a point: the leer is a grammar, and it can be pointed anywhere.

Cassie herself dresses for roles. By day it is pastels, florals and braids, which Machado likened to a shepherdess; at night the palette turns lurid. In the bars she plays the woman these men hope to find, the drunk girl, the easy mark, and the part is the trap.

The most important choices are about what the film will not show. It never shows the rape. When Cassie watches the video, we do not see it; we see her face. Fennell had the genre’s whole history of lingering on sexual violence to draw on, and she declined all of it. Nina’s body is never made into a second spectacle for a second audience, which is exactly what the video did to her once already.

And Nina herself never appears. She exists only in other people: in her mother’s memories, in a friendship pendant broken in two, in her name. Frantz argues that the absence is purposeful, a refusal of the genre’s old habit of presenting the victim as an attractive body. That is surely right. It is also the film’s hardest limit. A film about a woman nobody would listen to does not let us hear her either. Brian Eggert, reviewing it for Deep Focus Review, wrote that he kept wondering about Nina, and that beyond her mother’s anecdotes and one late scene we learn little of her. The film may be honest in this. Her voice was taken, and it will not fake one for her. But the price of that honesty is that the most wronged person in the story is also the most silent.

Under the revenge plot is a portrait of a stopped life. Cassie is thirty, sleeps in her childhood room, and has let every future she once had lapse. Her parents, played by Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown, love her and have no idea what to do. Machado put the question in front of Cassie as whether to move on with her arrested life or finish punishing the people who arrested it, and that is as exact a summary as the film allows. The film puts no clinical name to any of it, and neither will this essay. What it shows is grief, and guilt, and a friendship that did not end when one of the friends died.

The person with the strongest claim to grief says the hardest thing in the film. Nina’s mother asks Cassie to stop: to let go, and to live, because Nina would not have wanted her to destroy herself for this. The film gives that voice its full weight. Cassie’s revenge is carried out in Nina’s name, and Nina’s mother wants none of it. Whose grievance, then, is being pursued? Nina’s, certainly. Cassie’s own as well, and the guilt the film gives her. The film does not separate them, and it would be false to pretend they can be separated.

Fennell has described the choice in front of her heroine as two roads, one bright and easy, the other hard and lonely, and asked who would choose the hard one. The film’s Cassie takes the hard road, steps off it for a while, and is back on it the moment the video arrives.

After the dean comes the scene this essay takes as the film’s moral centre. Cassie goes to the house of the lawyer who defended Al, meaning to punish him, and finds a man already broken by what he did. He tells her he will never forgive himself. She forgives him. It is the only moment in the film when her language is not needed, because the listener has arrived before her. Set it beside Ryan, who asks to be forgiven while still protecting himself, and is refused. The film’s rule is quiet and exact: forgiveness goes to the one who has already heard.

This Library’s essay “Secret Sunshine, and the Forgiveness That Was Already Given” described a consolation that settles an injured person’s grievance through a third party and hands it back to her closed. Promising Young Woman contains the same structure, and seems to know it. Nina cannot forgive anyone. Any forgiveness in this story can only be given in her place, by someone else, which is exactly the kind of settlement that essay distrusted. The film allows it once, and only to the man who had stopped making excuses before Cassie ever came to his door.

What follows describes how the film ends.

Cassie goes to Al’s stag party at a remote cabin, in disguise. She drugs his friends, restrains Al, and asks him to tell her what he did. He will not. In his account he is the one something terrible happened to, and she asks him whether he can guess what every woman’s worst nightmare is. She tells him she will mark his body with Nina’s name, so that he carries it. In the struggle that follows, he kills her. A friend helps him hide what he has done.

The film does not stop there. Before she left, Cassie had sent the video to Jordan Green, the lawyer, with instructions to go to the police if she did not come back. Her parents report her missing. When the police ask Ryan, he tells them nothing about where she went, only that she was not in a good place. At Al’s wedding the police arrive and arrest him for her murder, and Ryan’s phone fills with messages she arranged in advance. The last is signed with both their names, Cassie’s and Nina’s.

Fennell has explained how she arrived at this. Her first draft ended with Cassie’s death, and the film’s backers, she said, balked. The version she had first imagined, in which Cassie walks into that room and triumphs, was never written, because, as she put it, there was no honest way to show it: it was not true. She said she could not imagine a woman in a room threatening a man and it playing out any other way, however much we might want it to. She called Cassie heroic, in a way that is distressing and may not be right, and said that what Cassie does was the only thing she felt she could do.

Here is what this essay takes from the ending. For most of the film Cassie’s language is fear, and fear works: it reaches Madison, and it reaches the dean. In the cabin the language changes. She moves from making people afraid to threatening a body, and a body is a grammar in which the stronger one decides. It is the one place in the film where her language could not win, and the film, which could have pretended otherwise, will not.

And the plan that wins is not revenge at all. It is a filing: a package to a lawyer, a missing-person report, a detective, an arrest. At the last, Cassie translated her account back into the only language the institutions around her ever accepted, which is evidence, and they received it. But look at what they received. The charge is her murder. Nina’s rape, as far as the film shows, is still not the case. Nina’s death brought no police to anyone’s door. Cassie’s did. The threshold for being heard, in this world, turned out to be a killing with the evidence already attached.

One detail is easy to miss. Al gets the police. Ryan gets the words. The last messages go to the man who watched, as he stands among the wedding guests. The final act of making someone hear is aimed at the bystander, and it is signed with Nina’s name beside Cassie’s.

So what it cost is plain, and the film does not soften it. Being heard cost Cassie her life. The people who could have heard at any earlier point would have paid almost nothing: a friend’s belief, a dean’s question, a lawyer’s refusal, one classmate putting a phone down. The whole difference in price between those two bills is the film’s argument.

Critics disagreed about the ending from the start, and the disagreement is worth setting out properly, because some of it lands.

Machado, who admired the film, thought the triumphant arrival of the police was perhaps the one place it truly falters, with its suggestion that the police and the courts are likely routes to justice for a woman who has been raped. She added that the film is not quite that simple, since its neat twist rests on the hard fact of Cassie’s murder. Frantz makes a related point more sharply: for all the film’s criticism of the institutions that protect rapists, its ending still casts the police as the saviour, and nothing in it suggests that another expensive lawyer could not bargain Al’s way out.

Eggert went further. Had the film ended at Cassie’s death, he wrote, he would have been floored by its boldness. The coda, in which the plan unfolds and the men are punished, turns what should be tragic into something close to vindication, and the ending feels, in his word, prankish rather than disquieting. Chang found the finale audacious and uncertain of itself at once, an attempt to fuse delight and fury that does not quite come together, though he found a thrill in watching it come apart.

The ending had its defenders on exactly this point. Machado, for all her doubt about the police, called it a triumph, but not the kind you would expect, and read the film’s revenge as a kind of self-destruction: not cathartic, not satisfying, but a way of asking a question.

Fennell’s own account answers some of this and concedes the rest. The death, she said, was the only honest way that room could end, and she called Cassie’s heroism distressing and possibly wrong. She also said that in her heart the story would have ended where her first draft did, close to where Eggert wished it had. A film can know that about itself and still be fairly accused of enjoying the last laugh.

This essay’s reading has weak points of its own, and the first is serious. Reading revenge as a demand to be heard may make the film more respectable than it is. It is a black comedy with a pop soundtrack and a winking emoticon as its final image, and it may simply enjoy its revenge more than this essay allows. Eggert’s objection applies here too: an essay can find an argument in something that was partly a prank.

The second is that the language works because the plot needs it to. In a film, a scheme succeeds because it was written to. Outside one, the same acts would mostly produce more harm and more fear, and no hearing at all, and the film’s own ending is the evidence.

The third comes from this Library itself. “I May Destroy You, and the Ending That Needs Nothing From Him” argued that revenge, like every ending built around the man, keeps him at the centre of her life. Promising Young Woman comes close to proving it. Cassie’s last night is organised entirely around Al, and her last years around the people who failed Nina. This essay has tried to show that the film knows this and counts it as the cost. It has not shown that knowing it is enough.

And the fourth: the film’s institutions are drawn as satire, broad and quick, and this essay has read them as a portrait. A reader who finds the dean a caricature, or the nice guys too easy a target, is not wrong about the film’s methods.

The film reached Japanese cinemas in July 2021. Two years later, in July 2023, Japan rebuilt its sexual offences around the absence of consent, and alongside that reform a separate new law came into force. It made it an offence in itself to film a person’s intimate parts, or a person during a sexual act, in certain ways, among them by taking advantage of a state in which it is difficult to form, express or carry through the will not to consent, and an offence to pass such a recording on. The Ministry of Justice explains the reason plainly: a recording made against someone’s will exposes that person to being seen by others on other occasions, and at worst by any number of strangers. That is the harm the video in the film carries. This essay applies no law to fictional people. It notes only that Japanese law now names the camera as a harm of its own.

The same reform extended the limitation periods for sexual offences by five years, and the Ministry’s explanation is worth reading slowly. Sexual harm, it says, comes to light less readily than other crimes, because shame and self-blame make it hard to report, and because the people around the victim find it hard to notice. The five years were set with reference to a Cabinet Office survey that asked people who had been forced into sex, and had told someone, how long it had taken them. The law, in other words, has begun to allow for the time it takes to be heard. What it assumes is a room that did not notice. The film is about a room that noticed perfectly well. A longer limitation period cannot make a witness speak.

The Cabinet Office’s 2023 survey on violence between men and women says something about who hears. Of the 130 women in it who said they had experienced non-consensual intercourse, 30 percent had told a friend or acquaintance, and 1.5 percent had contacted the police. Among the 86 women who had told no one, or had waited five years or more, about one in three, 32.6 percent, gave as a reason that they had thought telling would be useless. These are small numbers from a sample, and they cannot say how any one woman was received. But they point where the film points. When a woman tells anyone at all, the institution that hears her is most often a friend. And a good many of the women who stay silent, for years or for good, have concluded in advance that telling would do no good.

That is why the film is right to begin its reckoning with Madison. Before any dean or court, there is a friend across a table who has to decide what she has just heard. Nina’s friend decided it was drink, and a woman crying wolf. Much of what followed was built on those first minutes.

For a woman living in Japan far from the friends she grew up with, or in a language that is not her first, that first table may be hard to find at all. The friend who would have believed her may be a flight away.

In Japan, #8891 connects free of charge to the nearest one-stop support centre for victims of sexual crime and sexual violence, and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s Mamorouyo Kokoro page lists telephone and chat services, many of them free, some open around the clock and one with guidance in other languages, for anyone who is struggling, including with thoughts of dying.

Promising Young Woman is usually argued over as a revenge film that either does or does not endorse revenge. This essay has argued that the more useful question is what the revenge measures. It measures the hearing that was missing. Every scene of Cassie’s retribution marks a place where someone could have listened earlier, at very little cost, and did not. The film’s revenge is not a recommendation. It is the bill.

Read that way, the obligation falls where it belongs. Not on the woman who was harmed, to find a louder language, a better witness or a cleaner story, but on the people who hear her first. What is owed to a person telling us something hard is not a verdict. It is a hearing: enough attention to take in the whole account before deciding what it is. The film shows, one room at a time, how cheaply that could have been given, and what was paid when it was not.

Hearing is also work, and ordinary people can do it. Netflix’s Unbelievable, made in 2019 from a real case, follows a young woman charged with lying about her rape, and two detectives in another state whose patient work proves she told the truth. Nothing in that story required a new law or a heroine willing to die. It required two people who did the ordinary job of listening and kept doing it. Promising Young Woman imagines a world in which nobody inside any institution does that job, so that one grieving woman takes all of it on herself, investigator, judge and punisher at once, and is consumed by it.

And one thing from the bars is worth keeping, for anyone. Nice is not a fact about a man. It is how he sees himself, and the film is right that the word can do the work of an alibi. What a person is shows in what he does when the other person cannot refuse him. The film is not about men in general. It is about the ones who were sure they would pass.

This essay is cultural analysis. It is not clinical, legal or therapeutic advice, and it diagnoses no one: no clinical label is used for Cassie, for Al or for anyone else. Grief and guilt are described as the film shows them.

It offers nothing Cassie does as a method. Her pretended drunkenness, her deceptions and her confrontations are read as the film’s device, and nothing here suggests that anyone should attempt anything like them.

It does not claim that the film endorses revenge, or that it refuses to. Critics disagree, and their disagreement is reported in their own terms, paraphrased from their published writing. Fennell’s statements are reported as hers. No line of the film is quoted as exact.

The rape at the centre of the film is named and never described, just as the film never shows it. Nina’s death is stated once. No death is described with any method.

The Japanese law is described, not applied. The survey figures come from a small sample and are read only for what they show about who hears, and about why some women do not tell.

Nothing here implies that anyone who made or appears in the film, or any critic named, knows of or endorses this Library.

A few questions, for anyone who wants to keep this film a little longer.

When someone first told you something hard, what did you say in the first minute, and what did you ask? Is there an account you once decided not to hear, because hearing it would have cost you a friendship, a job, an evening? In the rooms you move through, who would be believed first, and who would be called difficult for saying the same thing? What would it take for you to be the one who puts the phone down?

If you are the one who was not heard, this essay has no instructions for you, and the film has none either. It shows one thing, and it is true: the failure to hear was theirs. You were never required to find a louder language.

At the end of the film, Nina’s name arrives on a phone at a wedding. It should have been heard in a dean’s office, years before.