Meewella | Critic

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Tag: Carey Mulligan

QuickView: Promising Young Woman (2020)

“Look how easy that was. I guess you just had to think about it in the right way.”

Cassandra

A bold and unpredictable female revenge thriller, stripped of the male gaze that typifies the genre, Promising Young Woman is an arresting directorial debut from Emerald Fennell. Carey Mulligan’s performance is enthralling, turning on a dime between vulnerable and predatory, but revealing greater emotional depth through her relationships with her parents, her boss and a potential new love interest. The juxtaposition of these softer scenes provides tonal shifts that are uncomfortable without feeling exploitative, since they are about the character’s different headspaces rather than simply a visual cut between sex and violence (indeed, for all the darkness of its subject matter, there is little of either on screen). Cassandra’s strength is her dauntlessness rather than aggression, leading to some wonderfully feminist wish-fulfilment sequences like silently staring down a group of catcalling builders until their bravado falters. The tonal disconnect is heightened through a soundtrack of female-fronted pop, culminating in an instrumental strings cover of Britney Spear’s Toxic that drips with menace. It is the combination of these aspects that makes Promising Young Woman feel so fresh in cinema, a continuation of television experiments like Killing Eve (on which Fennell was a writer). Using this remarkable concoction to make sharp points about rape culture, the prioritisation of men’s reputations, guilt, complicity and historic transgressions, makes this an important — as well as impressive — achievement.

9/10

QuickView: The Dig (2021)

“From the first human handprint on a cave wall, we’re part of something continuous.”

Basil Brown

A gentle British drama around the discovery of the Sutton Hoo burial site in 1938, The Dig is enjoyable without injecting unnecessary artifice to largely mundane work or becoming overly twee in its historic countryside setting. The first half is the most compelling, as landowner Edith Pretty and excavator Basil Brown make the discovery. The kinship between Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan’s characters is evident, with Pretty protecting Brown from the elitist incursions of his more academically qualified peers, and Brown adopting a paternal role toward her son. Once word of the find spreads, the cast grows significantly and the film’s focus unfortunately drifts away from its strongest characters to address the relationships between the younger newcomers. Set against the urgency of imminent war, there is greater emotional breadth than one might expect from a burial excavation. However, with no characters so well established as Pretty and Brown, we are invariably less invested in their outcomes.

7/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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