A woman who has drunkenly passed out on a stranger’s bed suddenly sounds wide awake and in control: “Hey! I said what are you doing?” The man who has been pawing her supine body lifts his head in alarm, suddenly aware that the gears of their encounter have shifted.

It’s a moment of rare asperity in Promising Young Woman, the directorial debut of actress and Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell. Carey Mulligan delivers a shrewd, intelligent turn as a woman driven to avenge herself on the date rapists and sleazebags who derailed her future, and her performance acts as a ballast for a movie that swerves toward feminist revenge fantasy one minute, self-conscious and heavily mannered semi-comedy the next. 

It opens with a group of leering bros in a bar weighing their chances of scoring with a woman obviously trashed off her ass. It’s the aforementioned young man who comes to her rescue, and before you know it, they are back at his place, where he offers his already hammered guest another cocktail. (Having recently rewatched Working Girl, this reviewer uncomfortably noticed Harrison Ford plying an already wasted Melanie Griffith with a “nightcap.”) However, the would-be rescuer is startled when his quarry comes to life and turns the tables. He’s just one of the marks on whom she has set her sights. 

Turns out Cassie bailed out of medical school long ago, her promising career derailed by a traumatic incident that others soft-pedaled or denied. She now lives with her parents and works in a coffee shop, seemingly without plans for the future. Oh, but Cassie does have a plan. She sizes up opportunists, milquetoasts, and wimpy predators with an eye toward exposing and humiliating them. When a straight-arrow classmate from her past (Bo Burnham) shows up at the coffee shop with hopes of courting her, Cassie’s plot to reckon with the past thickens and widens

However, director Fennell’s attention to hyper-stylized visuals may have overwhelmed the revenge mission component of her story. Flourishes of the 1980s festoon the film like tufts of cotton candy, from the saturated Heathers-style color scheme and flirtatious When Harry Met Sally dialogue to the characterizations of Cassie’s parents, who seem to have strolled in from a vague working-class zone somewhere between Taxi and Moonstruck. These stylistic trademarks occasionally sharpen the movie’s satire, but more often they end up slowing the film down without much connection to the intense themes it claims to engage. Scenes where Cassie confronts her tormentors come off artificial and unconvincing, especially one that wastes the always watchable Connie Britton as a smarmy school administrator.

For a tale focused on vengeance, it could use more jolts, scares, and grit. It’s only at the movie’s cynical, downbeat ending that the stakes ever feel particularly visceral, but in a way that lets down a great deal of what has gone on before. Promising Young Woman might have wanted to tell a devastating story, but it settles for gestures, albeit clever and stylish ones.