hadn’t been intending to watch Promising Young Woman, the rape-revenge fantasy film that picked up four Golden Globe nominations this week. I just read the thumbnail description and, ugh, I was out. Movies in this genre tend to meet violence with violence and always include drawn-out rape scenes that – like every other rape scene in every other movie, and a lot of bad crime fiction, too – present torture porn as some kind of feminist gesture. Who needs it after a long day at work? I can’t say what changed my mind, although reading accounts by Evan Rachel Wood and four other women, this week, of their alleged abuses at the hands of Marilyn Manson certainly helped put me in the mood for something more strident than hand-wringing. Promising Young Woman – the title inverts the trope of the “promising young man”, a phrase that crops up, with depressing frequency, in the defence of college-aged men accused of rape – is written and directed by Emerald Fennell and has divided critics. It is thin, didactic, preachy, reductive, uneven and flippant towards victims of sexual assault. Alternatively, it is a thrilling and cathartic expression of post-#MeToo female rage towards a problem that never goes away. It’s true, the movie is thin in some ways. Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, a 30-year-old drifter who once had a promising medical career, cut short by something terrible (I’ll avoid spoilers) that happened at college. When we meet her, she is engaged in a campaign of revenge that involves going to bars, faking blackout drunkenness, and awaiting some predatory “nice guy’s” offer to escort her home. In every instance, the guy takes her to his apartment for one last drink, puts the moves on her corpse-like body, and promptly has a heart attack when she snaps to sobriety and asks him what the hell he thinks he is doing. This is not a movie that explores with any realism the PTSD fallout from sexual assault; for that, you need something like Unbelievable, the 2019 miniseries directed by Lisa Cholodenko, which features the only depictions I’ve ever seen of rape that aren’t shot from the point of view of the rapist. Neither is it a template for action; some of the madder critiques have suggested that, because Cassie’s character does bad things in pursuit of rough justice, she traduces the status of victims everywhere. This is an odd interpretation of what drama is for, and raises the dog-eared old lie that to be worthy of sympathy, victims must be unimpeachably behaved. You can imagine how this movie might have looked under the direction of, say, Quentin Tarantino, and it shares some cartoonish aspects with his style. Crucially, however, the swagger and smirking humour don’t climax in a bloodbath, with the exception of a twist I won’t ruin. Cassie is not a serial killer and the rape scene itself is never shown – just her expression as she watches it on video. The heroine seeks merely to redress an imbalance of perception, one that in spite of huge protest movements never quite goes away: that sexual assault is excused to the point of no-big-deal when the victim is drunk; that promising young men matter more than promising young women. What’s stunning about Promising Young Woman is, in fact, the modesty of Cassie’s ambitions. The flap caused when a reviewer at Variety suggested Mulligan was miscast – she interpreted it as saying that she wasn’t “hot enough”; he insisted he meant no such thing – was overblown. However, there was one erroneous aspect of his review, in my opinion, which was the description of Mulligan’s character as “an apparent femme fatale” who once a week “dresses to the nines” to ensnare the town’s predators. The depressing, and entirely realistic, aspect of the movie is that she doesn’t, uniformly, dress to the nines, and “femme fatale” is the wrong description entirely. In the movie’s opening scene, Cassie is neither seductive, cute nor flirtatious. Instead, she is lolling “drunk” on a banquette, dressed in modest business attire. Here is the central point of the movie, and its searing critique: that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you’re old, young, thin, fat, dressed-up or dressed-down. It doesn’t matter if you’re “hot” or not, promising or hopeless. All that matters, in these moments, is that you are too out of it to consent. There’s no honey-trap; just a woman in a suit who is “asking for it”.