Promising Young Woman, the movie from Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, released its first trailer, and it’s a fresh take on revenge.
Emerald Fennell gave us one of our latest television obsessions in Killing Eve, but she’s not content just to rule the world of TV. She’s out to conquer the world of cinema, and judging by the trailer for her new movie Promising Young Woman, she’s about to rock our world.
Promising Young Woman stars Carey Mulligan and offers a slick take on revenge flicks. The trailer kicks off with a pretty terrifying scenario we all know too well: a young woman (Mulligan) who is incredibly drunk, and a man (Adam Brody) the woman doesn’t know, who comes over to help her get home safely.
However, once the two of them are alone and the trailer makes it seem like a sexual assault is about to happen, the movie takes a sharp turn (about 34 seconds in, if you want to skip the build-up to the attempted rape) for the unexpected and utterly badass.
“Every week, I go to a club. I act like I’m too drunk to stand. And every week, a nice guy comes over to see if I’m okay,” Mulligan’s narration explains at the beginning of the Promising Young Woman trailer. While it isn’t totally clear what she does with these “nice guys,” the massive tally she keeps after each interaction with one of these men makes us think that she’s doing something pretty intense to ensure these men can’t hurt anyone again.
So why is she doing this? Well, the motives for this revenge plot in Promising Young Woman aren’t made explicit in the trailer. However, it seems to be implied that Mulligan’s character, or someone close to her, was the survivor of some sort of sexual assault in college that wasn’t believed by the powers that be.
While the story is all-too-familiar to many of us, the story we see in Promising Young Woman feels like an almost cathartic take on seeking revenge on these men. And with Fennell behind the film, it seems that we’ll have hard topics like rape and assault handled responsibly and with care.
Of course, we’ll have to reserve our final judgment until the movie officially hits theaters. You can see Promising Young Woman when it premieres on April 17.
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