This 2020 film written and directed by Emerald Fennell stars Carey Mulligan as a woman whose best friend was sexually assaulted by a group of men when they were in med school, an attack that led to the friend's death. This incident led Mulligan's character to drop out of school and put the brakes on her once promising academic and professional life. At the age of 30, she still lives with her parents and works a dead end job as a barista. This leaves her the time for her true pursuit -- going out at night to clubs and bars and posing as drunk to attract predatory men who she then teaches some pretty intense lessons. When she crosses paths with the actual men who assaulted her friend, she escalates things further as she plans an elaborate revenge.
This film has gotten a lot of attention for understandable reasons -- it's a provocative, highly-stylized fantasia that directly takes on some of the hottest hot buttons of our times -- #Metoo, rape culture, and the dreadful state of relations between women and men in our modern world.
Mulligan is terrific in the lead role and is ably supported by Bo Burnham, Laverne Cox, Clancy Brown, and Jennifer Coolidge.
The movie itself is sometimes a thriller, sometimes a dark black comedy, and sometimes a horror movie. And that's sort of it's problem -- it touches on all these genres, but never commits to being any one of them and so to me it often felt too tentative. While it was definitely an interesting watch, at the end I was left wishing that it had leaned more in one of these directions or the other and that it had been much more extreme in its violent and revenge aspects than it actually was. This is a film full of rage and anger beneath the surface and I wished it had let that anger and rage loose more on the screen. I think it might have worked better if it was less stylized and a bit more down and dirty and exploitative.
With that said, it's certain a striking and original film and definitely worth watching. I just wish it had been a bit "more."
