Rape-revenge films aren’t feminist, per se, but rather they represent the “way in which Hollywood can be seen to be making sense of feminism,” argues scholar Jacinda Read in her 2000 book, The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity, and the Rape-Revenge Cycle. But the plot device is nothing new it spawned a whole subgenre of exploitation films back in the 1970s, including the gory thriller I Spit on Your Grave, and continued to turn up in hundreds of movies over the decades. The rape-revenge narrative has had a resurgence in recent years, as a sort of wish fulfillment for the #MeToo era. In Promising Young Woman, justice takes the form of the rape-revenge narrative, in which a character experiences or witnesses an act of sexual violence and then extracts vengeance on the perpetrator. Her ploys continue to escalate and become more destructive, riding the steady winds of her rage. After watching the man who assaulted Nina go unpunished, friends become complacent, and the school ignore the incident, Cassie steps into a new role: that of voracious avenger. Her motivation trickles out as the film progresses: Cassie’s best friend, Nina, was raped while in medical school, causing her to drop out and then presumably to kill herself.
In several of the film’s opening scenes, ultra-feminine Cassie, played by Carey Mulligan, tricks a random man into thinking she’s inebriated, follows along as he tries to hook up with her without her consent, and then 180s on him, abruptly casting off her intoxication to shame her would-be rapist in the act. If you’ve seen Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, you anticipated this sudden reversal.
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