Clever, funny and stomach-knotting: Promising Young Woman reviewed

Promising Young Woman is a rape-revenge-thriller that has already proved divisive but is a wonderfully clever, darkly funny, stomach-knotting — my stomach may never unknot — exploration of what #notallmen seem to get: it isn’t OK to have sex with a woman who has had a few too many and isn’t in a position to give consent. Unless, of course, she is also out late at night and wearing a short skirt in which case: asking for it. We all know that.

This is written and directed by the extraordinary polymath that is Emerald Fennell, who was head writer for the second series of Killing Eve, has collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on his forthcoming Cinderella, and is a novelist and actress. (She played Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown; I don’t know if she’s also a black belt at judo but there has to be a chance.) It stars Carey Mulligan as Cassie, a medical school drop-out whose best friend, Nina, committed suicide after she was raped at a college party while other boys looked on, laughing. Cassie now lives with her despairing parents, works in a coffee shop and has an unusual hobby: revenge, served cold and also often.

Every week she goes to a club where she appears to be head-lollingly, flat-out, falling-down drunk. One man might nudge another. ‘Look at that. God almighty, get some dignity sweetheart,’ he might say, while also sensing an opportunity. The man will take her back to his place and just as he’s getting her knickers off she will sit bolt upright, stone-cold sober, and say: ‘What are you doing?’ It’s a shock. It’s stressful. It’s stomach-knotting. If he knows he can’t have sex with her now she’s sober, why did he think he could when she was drunk? But he’s not ‘a rapist’.