Review of Promising Young Woman (2020) by Km123 — 24 Jul 2023

The movie works ok if you treat it as an absurdist revenge fantasy and strongly suspend disbelief. Even then there are some problems with tonal shifts as it often can't decide how funny or serious it wants to be, and many characters are jarringly one-dimensonal. While you understand the main character's motivation, you can't help but cringe at how utterly self destructive her behaviour is and how petty her goals are. Sometimes other people's actions destroy your life, but other times you let their actions destroy you. The latter is the case here.

Applying any kind of expectation of realism causes the entire plot to fall apart. How the hell could an explicit video of a med student's unconscious date rape make the rounds in class to the point where copies casually still exist 10 years later without anyone notifying administration? This would have occurred around 2013, not 1965 - this **** was taken quite seriously and this kind of evidence would have resulted in multiple expulsions and probably major legal repercussions for the perpetrator and witnesses. Hell, even providing the video in question to police or posting it on social media would have produced the results the protagonist wanted without requiring her suicide. The protagonist's 'date rape bait' missions likely would almost never go how she seems to want them to. Likely most of the time nobody would pick her up, sometimes someone would get her a cab, others would result in guys taking her home, deciding she is too drunk and letting her sleep. And occasionally she would get taken home by a legit psycho who wouldn't take no for an answer even after she 'woke up'. She's putting herself in a world of danger here.

The entire denouement at the bachelor party would have likely failed - what was her plan if her target didn't manage to get loose, or decided not to spontaneously kill her? Was she actually going to brand him, leave, and go to jail for it? What if one of the participants was sober and refused her drugged vodka shot, or got the dose wrong and some of them didn't pass out? What if the target called the police right away and managed to convince them that killing her was self-defence? She did drug 10 grown men with roofies and had a kit full of torture tools!

Again, what you get from this movie comes down to some serious suspension of disbelief.