Promising Young Woman (2020) Script Review | #23 WGA 101 Greatest Scripts of the 21st Century
Twisty, unpredictable, but dark and delicious, Emerald Fennell brings her own flavor of style to the thriller genre.
Logline: A young woman, traumatized by a tragic event in her past, seeks out vengeance against those who crossed her path..
Written by: Emerald Fennell
Pages: 139
Promising Young Woman has the kind of premise that could have easily turned into something exploitative or nonsensical. But what we get instead is something spikier, deadlier; it’s such a daring twist on the revenge thriller genre that it’s impossible to tear yourself away from the page. There’s nothing quite like it out there.
Let’s start with the opening scene, possibly the most memorable and unnerving sequence in the entire screenplay. A group of men have converged at a bar after work; there’s the alpha-bro Paul, and the shy Jez. They’re complaining about an unnamed (and unseen) female colleague who appears to resent their ability to close deals better with clients by virtue of their male privilege. The conversation gets interrupted by the sight of a hammered Cassandra Thomas. While Paul and another co-worker, Jim, make inappropriate comments about Cassandra’s state, Jez goes over to check on her. When she appears to have lost her phone and can’t get back home, Jez offers to drop her on the way. At first, it seems fine. Then he asks whether she wants to grab one drink back at his place before going home, even though she’s already drunk. Then he pours her a glass that is significantly more than he’s put for himself. Cassandra complains that she’s feeling sick and wants to lie down. But Jez starts slowly unbuttoning her dress and pulling off her underwear, despite her drunk protests. We think it’s going to go down the dark road that it is hurtling down, until the scene drops the record-scratching reveal: Cassandra was never drunk at all.
The scene lasts 11 pages, and does exactly what a good opening scene should: It sets up the tone, the premise, and grabs you immediately from the get-go. I mean, the first two paragraphs alone tell you at once that this is not going to be your usual flavor of thriller. In fact, it could work perfectly well as a stand-alone short film or a proof-of-concept. Indeed, this would be the scene used when Emerald Fennell went around pitching Promising Young Woman to producers; and it would be the same scene that would convince producers Margot Robbie, Tom Ackerley, Josey McNamara, and Sophia Kerr at LuckyChap Entertainment to close the deal.
It’s also a hell of a way to introduce a character. Before the story has even begun proper, we can tell that Cassandra Thomas is not to be messed with. Over the course of the next 128 pages, the pieces come together about what pushed her into this secret vigilante-like night life. Cassandra was once a ‘promising young woman’ studying medicine. But when her best friend, Nina Fisher, kills herself after a terrible incident at college, Cassandra abandons her studies to embark on a mission of vengeance against seemingly ‘nice guys,’ putting herself out there so that she can catch them out as not-so-nice as they believe themselves to be. We don’t see the aftermath of what happens after Cassandra stops Jez, but we do see how one of her nights play out on with a different guy, a pretentious would-be writer called Neil.
Is it risky? Extremely! In a scene on page 43 (that got deleted in the finished film), there’s a moment when we see exactly what the toll of these nightly excursions can be like.
Since giving up medicine, Cassandra has moved back in with her parents, and works a dead-end job at a coffee shop. Her social life is virtually non-existent except for her boss, Gail; her parents, Stanley and Susan, privately worry about her; even Cassandra doesn’t seem interested in her life outside of pretending to be drunk so that she can go home with men trying to take advantage of her state and scare them shitless. But when a former classmate, Ryan Cooper, runs into her at the coffee shop, a chance of starting a new life slowly and tantalizingly dangles within Cassandra’s reach. But you know how the genre works: Even when she finally begins to think she can leave behind this life, she’s pulled right back into it.
What is it that compels her to stay her dark path? Two things, both connected to one person: Al Monroe. He’s the man accused of having sex with Nina repeatedly and in front of his friends while she was too drunk to consent. Despite Nina’s claims, the college dean ultimately did not follow up on it due to insufficient information. Al thrived; Nina spiraled and took her own life. And now Al is getting married. The news enrages Cassandra no end, and spurs her to turn her crusade personal. She starts with Madison McPhee, surreptitiously recreating a scenario where Madison wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of how she got there— why? Because when Nina first made the accusations against Al, Madison dismissed them and placed the blame on Nina for getting too drunk. Her next target is Dean Walker, who didn’t follow up the charges against Al and denied Nina from getting justice. But even though Cassandra comes out on top both times, the toll hits hard, as evidenced by a freakout in the middle of the road.
There’s a twist when Cassandra goes after her third target: Jordan Green, the man who defended Al against Nina. Unlike the others, Jordan has not forgotten about Nina; unlike the others, he’s actually wracked with guilt over the case (and other cases like it). The unexpected turn of events, and a harsh encounter with Nina’s mother, forces Cassandra to give up her crusade on page 92. She patches things up with Ryan, and for a brief moment— or 10 pages— she allows herself to be happy.
(It’s worth highlighting the ‘Stars Are Blind’ sequence, a hilarious bonding moment for Cassandra and Ryan, where the latter is secure enough in his masculinity to lip-sync along to the Paris Hilton song, and the former gives into her femininity around this guy. On the page, it’s two small paragraphs— proof that great moments can seem underestimated on the page. See the clip to see how it turned out).
But this is a tale of revenge, and there can be no happiness for the protagonist. The illusion is shattered on page 106 when Madison returns to the story with a tape of the night. The night. Seeing actual footage of Nina’s rape is horrifying by itself. But for Cassandra, it’s a double-blow that signals the Low Point and the end of Act 2: for in the video, among the people watching Al have sex with a drunken Nina, is none other than Ryan.
Devastated, Cassandra breaks up with Ryan and, disguising herself as a stripper, goes to Al Munroe’s bachelor party. She intends to enact her revenge on Al once and for all. She drugs the others, takes Al to a room, handcuffs him to the bed before confronting him, and prepares to carve Nina’s name into his flesh—
— only for Al to break one hand out of the cuffs, and strangle Cassandra to death.
Yes, dear reader. Twelve pages before the end, Fennell kills off the protagonist. The original ending, however, was bleaker— it was going to end with Al and Joe burning Cassandra’s body, letting Al getting away once again. But the financiers, understandably, balked at such an ending. Fennell toyed with another version where Cassandra killed everyone at the bachelor party but found it unrealistic— such a ‘fuck you’ revenge ending would have been physically impossible. From the start, Fennell knew that Cassandra’s quest could only end in death. But she found a way to have her cake and eat it, too, by creating a different ending in which Cassandra had a back-up plan in case she didn’t make it through: releasing the video and getting Al arrested. In a sense, she was able to get the justice that eluded Nina, but at the cost of her own life.
Promising Young Woman hammers us with uncomfortable truths about male privilege, complicity, and even the toxic culture that allows men to think they can get away with bad behavior. The frightening thing about the male characters in this script is not they’re mustache-twirling villains; they’re otherwise seemingly decent and nice to the rest of the world. Fennell wanted to toy with the idea that “men who are perceived as ‘good guys’ are also capable of bad behavior.” Even Ryan, who is probably the most decent of the lot, is compromised by his failure to stop Al— and for not coming clean with the truth to the detectives because he’s afraid that the truth about Al and the video will tarnish his reputation. It’s not exactly his greatest moment.
Fennell avoids falling into the trope of the ‘traumatized woman’ by using two tactics:
Ensuring that the trauma in question is not directly connected to Cassandra;
Giving Cassandra a personality, flaws, and a sense of humor.
Playing up Cassandra’s femininity by having her dress up in pink and other bright colors.
Her objective was to write “something that felt like a revenge journey [that] a real woman might go on.” Even though Fennell is a fan of the revenge genre, she finds revenge to be frightening and vengeance to be anything but noble. We see the cost it takes on the person and those in her immediate orbit, especially her parents.
Something worth highlighting is how Fennell writes text messages into a script without making them obtrusive—by bolding the text and simply inserting them as a normal action line. Clean, simple, unfussy.
Despite its slightly longer than average page count, Promising Young Woman reads at a really brisk pace. The use of short action lines and funny banter keep the reader engaged. It’s also a page-turner because it’s impossible to know how this story is going to turn out.
Before she moved behind the camera, Fennell worked as an actress and wrote horror novels early in her career. Her books include those catalogued as the Shiverton Hall series, and the 2015 adult horror novel, Monsters. Like many actors who made the jump to writer— see Taylor Sheridan, Greta Gerwig— Fennell is able to write the kind of material that actors gravitate to, partly because she’s writing dialogue that actors can actually speak.
The idea for Promising Young Woman began with the opening scene and unfolded from there, though she waited until she had the entire story down before sitting down to write a single word. In 2017, she started going around pitching, though unsurprisingly, buyers balked until LuckyChap Entertainment saw its potential. Their gamble paid off— apart from being successful at the box-office in 2020 (the COVID-pandemic first year!), it earned five Academy Award nominations including for Best Picture and Best Director, winning for Best Original Screenplay1. In doing so, Fennell became the first woman in 13 years to win in that category after Diablo Cody won for Juno. She also won the Writers Guild of America Award in the same category.
Fennell clearly has a knack for writing subversive and creative takes on genres; whether it’s a hit or miss, her eye for creative big swings must be acknowledged. May Promising Young Woman be the first of many such tales to come from a writer like her.
Notes:
Erbland, Kate (December 23, 2020) | ‘Promising Young Woman’: Emerald Fennell on Her Mission to Upend Moviegoers’ Thirst for Violence (Indiewire)
Fennel, Emerald (February 9, 2021) | Painful, but fun to watch. ‘Promising Young Woman’ is a ‘poison popcorn movie.’ (LA Times)
Sandberg, Bryn (February 2, 2021) | Making of ‘Promising Young Woman’: How Emerald Fennell Tackled Unbridled Femininity in a Dark Comedy (The Hollywood Reporter)
Aurthur, Kate; Donnelly, Matt (January 16, 2021) | Let’s Talk About the Knockout Ending of ‘Promising Young Woman’ (Variety)
Aurthur, Kate; Donnelly, Matt (December 9, 2020) | ‘Promising Young Woman’: How Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell Made the Most Audacious, Feminist Movie of the Year (Variety)
The only other contender that year in the Best Screenplay categories, both Adapted and Original, to make the cut for the WGA List of 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century was Nomadland.