No use hiding from the piper.

Someday a real rain will come and… tidy this place up, or something.

From the moment the trailer dropped, I was, let’s say, extremely primed to hate Promising Young Woman. And when it seemed like it was going to be infinitely delayed thanks to COVID-19, I ended up reading the script, which was floating around online, and which I found confirmed most of my negative impressions from the trailer. So by the time I could actually watch it, I went into the movie mostly intending to have confirmed my own pre-formed opinion.

So I want to foreground the following with the surprising fact of watching the movie: I kind of liked it! My problems with it in general remain, and we’ll get to them. But the movie is held together through Carey Mulligan’s performance, which I found remarkable, and while you wish she were working with better material, I thought she did a great job as somebody who chooses not to heal and follow where that leads her. She is what holds the movie together, and that is why it doesn’t work on paper but kind of works on screen. (Which is a useful…