‘Promising Young Woman’ Isn’t Some Far-Fetched Revenge Fantasy—It Shows How I Felt After My Own Experience

When I first saw the trailer for Promising Young Woman, it looked like the perfect revenge romp to sink my teeth into, the kind of film where the bad guys actually pay for their wrongdoings and the women win. You know, the made-up kind that typically only grace our screens for the catharsis. At least, that’s what I was thinking even up until I eagerly paid the 20 bucks to enjoy the movie from the comfort of my couch. What I got instead was a film that laid bare, better than I’ve ever seen on my screen, the ugly truth about the way society fails its female victims.

The film’s heroine, Cassandra “Cassie” Thomas, is at the top of her class in med school and on her way to becoming a doctor when her best friend Nina Fischer is raped by a classmate while intoxicated. A gaggle of khaki-pants-clad medical students stands by watching, laughing, and filming. Traumatized, Nina drops out of college. Cassie leaves med school too, trying to pick up the pieces of her shell of a best friend. But in the film, we don’t ever get to meet Nina, because Nina is dead. The story begins in the wake of her death, her absence a character of its own.

The first time we see Cassie, she’s center-frame, surrounded by a red vinyl cushioned wall. She’s in a nightclub, thumping with synth-heavy girl pop, and she’s faking inebriation, waiting for the guy looking to take a drunk girl home. When one arrives—because let’s face it, one often does—she humors him until he tries to seal the deal. Then, boom, she scares him with her sobriety and a stern verbal lashing.

Cute, I thought, but there’s no way this would pan out without her getting hurt. As a viewer, I kept trying to jump ahead, thinking I knew what was really going on. Then I realized the only one who actually knows what’s happening is Cassie—not any of the other characters and not me sitting on my couch, biting my nails and nursing my cabernet. I watched as Cassie repeatedly put herself in danger, risking her own well-being to, hopefully, save the next drunk girl from that all-too-common fucked-up fate. That’s the burden that female victims bear, to try and save the next girl.

Like many women, I’m well aware. When I was a teenager, I had my own experience with a similar kind of violence to the one Cassie is working so hard to avenge. My boyfriend at the time, my first real boyfriend, who I’d been dating for the majority of my adolescence, called me a c*nt. I punched him in the mouth in response. We were both drinking, and I regretted it as soon as I felt my knuckles collide with his teeth. I ran away from him but not fast enough. He tackled me with the force of a man who nearly doubled me in size (and certainly in strength) and I shattered like glass under the heel of a heavy boot. My ribs were fractured, the L5 disk in my back was ruptured, and my nose is now permanently slanted to the left.

When my mom dragged me to the doctor, an X-ray technician photographed my bones while I pouted in a bulky lead vest. I was surprised when the radiologist explained that I’d suffered serious bodily injury. I hadn’t realized I was so fragile.

Like Cassie learns from Nina’s experience, and like I learned from my own, pressing charges against someone is not easy. The criminal justice system makes it hell. In the film, we learn that Nina had been relentlessly bullied by the defense attorney in her case, her “friends” victim-blamed her for getting too drunk, and the dean at the university refused to reprimand her rapist—the boy with his whole life ahead of him. While what happened to the fictional Nina and what happened to me have different details, social retribution came swiftly for me too. Mutual friends and acquaintances who caught wind of what happened rejected me as if I were a leper. Like Cassie—who as a result of her friend’s rape, is left feeling cheated and bereft of resolve—all the good and all the potential in my life seemed to be held hostage to my own feelings of helplessness, resentment, and rage.

Even though I could vividly recall what happened that night, I questioned myself. The district attorney pressed if I’d provoked my boyfriend rather than it being the other way around. I punched him after he called me a c*nt. I was clear about this. But still, I wanted to understand if I had any culpability. That’s what I’d been programmed to do. In the cases where women are beat up, sexually assaulted, and/or raped, there’s always a line of questioning that comes for the victim. Were you drinking? Do you typically walk home alone? What were you wearing? Did you give him a reason? Bad things don’t happen to good girls—that’s the idea our society tries to ingrain. That’s what we see in most pop culture moments that depict these kinds of incidents.

But not this one. Cassie is female rage incarnate. Her purpose in life devolves from aspiring doctor to caretaker of her best friend to the bringer of justice: the grim reaper to unassuming fuckboys looking for an unethical lay. Cassie is on her own, something she’s understood all along. And her need for vengeance holds her back. It keeps her from having friends, pursuing a fulfilling career, and falling in love. She’s stuck in limbo, the same way a ghost lingers with unfinished business.