Lady VENGEANCE

Written and directed by Killing Eve S2’s Emerald Fennell and starring an electrifying Carey Mulligan, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN is an early contender for most provocative film of the year. Total Film meets the team behind the talking-point movie that’s part candy-coloured romcom, part hot-button thriller.

- DAMON WISE

Once in a blue moon a film comes along with a premise so exquisite and simple that it’s surprising no one’s ever thought about it before – but one that’s also so morally complex that audiences will already be arguing about it even while the final credits are rolling. Directed by 34-year-old Brit Emerald Fennell, Promising Young Woman is a dark superhero movie where the hero has no superpowers but the ability to shame. At the same time, it’s a clever, funny and engaging film that takes familiar movie tropes and turns them so far inside out that by the end you won’t know if you’ve just seen a truly scary romcom or a very funny horror.

Key to its charm is Carey Mulligan, who plays Cassandra “Cassie” Thomas. Cassie still lives with her parents at home in the suburbs of LA and works day shifts at a laid-back coffee shop. She’s a mousey, underachieving woman who dropped out of college and never thought to drop back in, but by night she has an alter ego. Wearing a variety of disguises – office girl, club girl, hipster – she trawls the city’s bars posing as a flat-out drunk. And every night she gets a bite, giving would-be date rapists the fright of their lives when she suddenly snaps into focus.

This isn’t simply a lurid vigilante story, however. When Cassie meets offbeat paediatrician Ryan (Bo Burnham), things taken an unexpected turn: is Ryan the proof that Cassie needs that not all men are monsters? And will she finally move on from the traumatic past of her best friend Nina, the motivating factor behind Cassie’s ever more ingenious rampage of revenge?