114 min | R | December 25, 2020 | Focus Features
Cassie spends her nights pretending to be too drunk to stand, waiting for the nice guy who offers her a ride home to show what he really wants. By day she works a coffee counter and lets her medical-school dropout look like a tragedy. The men keep failing the test, and she keeps score.
Cassandra Thomas is thirty, lives with her parents, and works a job beneath her abandoned promise. Every weekend she goes to a bar, performs blackout drunkenness, and waits for a man to “help” her. The film weaponizes the predator’s favorite lie, that he is one of the good ones, and turns it back on him. Emerald Fennell takes the rape-revenge thriller and strips out the violence the genre usually trades on. What remains is a study of grief calcified into a vocation. Cassie is not hunting strangers at random. She is avenging one specific thing she cannot let go.
Carey Mulligan plays Cassie with a flat affect that hides a furnace. She delivers cruelty in a sweet voice and lets the smile arrive a beat too late. The performance refuses to make Cassie likable or healed, and that refusal is the point. Bo Burnham plays Ryan Cooper as the charming pediatrician who seems decent, and Burnham uses his comic timing to make the decency feel real before the film tests it. Alison Brie plays Madison McPhee with brittle defensiveness, and Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge play Cassie’s parents as people watching their daughter disappear at the dinner table.
Fennell directs her first feature with a candy-colored palette that fights the material on purpose. Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun shoots the suburbs and the bars in bubblegum pink and neon, framing predation inside the visual language of a romantic comedy. The needle drops do the same work. A Britney Spears string arrangement scores a confrontation, and the prettiness curdles the scene. Fennell wrote the script as well, and she structures it in titled chapters that count Cassie’s marks like notches.
This is a film about a woman who decided that justice and self-destruction are the same road. The tonal swings between rom-com and horror are deliberate, and they do not always hold. Some scenes ask the audience to laugh and recoil in the same breath, and the seams show. The ending divides people because it commits to a logic the rest of the film has been building toward, and that logic offers no comfort. Fennell made a provocation, not a catharsis, and she knows the difference.