<em>Promising Young Woman </em>Sets a Ravishing Trap

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The film’s premise arose from a simple question: If a woman in real life wanted to take revenge on men who prey on inebriated women, what would that look like? Fennell told me that the first time she could envision the movie was when she imagined a scene that anchors the trailer: An ostensibly stumbling, slurring woman is “rescued” by a man who escorts her to his house, plies her with more alcohol, and begins assaulting her while murmuring platitudes about how pretty she is. Early in the film, the guy is played by The OC’s Adam Brody, the platonic ideal of a twinkly non-threat. “What are you doing?” Cassie mumbles, while he hushes her and takes off her underwear. “Wait.” He tells her she’s safe and carries on. Suddenly, she sits up straight, sober as a heart attack. “Hey,” she says. “I said, What are you doing?”

Fennell is 35; she came of age during the aughts, when raunch culture was ascendant and the idea of alcohol impairing someone’s ability to consent to sex hadn’t entered pop-cultural consciousness. She remembers watching reality shows in which “girls would wake up and not know what had happened the night before, and it was like a twist, like a shocker. It was never treated seriously.” She’s also interested in “good people doing bad things” and the way a culture can not only permit ugly behavior but even support it. When it comes to “he said, she said” allegations, she told me, “what’s so disturbing to me is that you so often … find both [parties] are saying the same thing happened; they just felt very differently about it.” The genius of Cassie’s ruse is that it forces the men into a confrontation with themselves: Why are they so horrified that the person they’re groping isn’t blackout drunk after all?

The movie’s hyperreality and its take on sexual politics feel unmistakably contemporary, but its pop-cultural cues hint at a reckoning with the recent past. I won’t reveal too much, but the event that unmoored Cassie happened almost a decade ago. Songs by Britney Spears (an orchestral cover of “Toxic”), the Spice Girls, and even Rodgers and Hammerstein are meticulously placed in the background of key moments. In the film’s most joyful scene, Cassie and her new boyfriend, Ryan (Bo Burnham), dance in a drugstore to Paris Hilton’s 2006 reggae-pop number “Stars Are Blind,” a kitschy hit by an icon of hyperfemininity whose sex tape was allegedly sold without her consent and watched by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. “I’ve always loved that song,” Fennell sighed.

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In the “Stars Are Blind” scene, Cassie wears pink and Ryan wears blue. The colors recur throughout their relationship, subtly coding them as different creatures even in their most intimate moments. But the film also employs pink throughout to play with people’s assumptions about certain kinds of women and certain kinds of art. Fennell notes with satisfaction that her art director was Michael Perry, who once worked on the 1990s TV series Sweet Valley High. “So much of [Promising Young Woman] is a dark comedy really,” she told me, “and one that’s designed to be pleasurable and misleadingly diverting and colorful and distracting.” She thinks people still tend to have “a very fixed idea of what denotes something serious … and it’s usually kind of gritty and real and gray.” Art that sends off stereotypically feminine signals is too easily interpreted as frivolous, even when its power is hiding in plain sight. “You can like Britney Spears and multicolored manicures,” Fennell said, “and still be dangerous.”