In Defense of the ‘Promising Young Woman’ Ending

Warning: This article contains major Promising Young Woman spoilers, and the Promising Young Woman twist is a pretty big deal. If you haven’t yet watched the film, bookmark this piece and come back to it. 

Promising Young Woman is a tragedy. I don’t mean that it is horrifically sad—though certainly many of the plot points are devastating—but rather that it is the literary definition of tragedy, in which the hero of a play creates their own downfall. The power-hungry Icarus flies too close to the sun, the prideful Oedipus unknowingly kills his own father, the vengeful Hamlet gets his revenge at the cost of his life, and so on and so forth. Tragedies nearly always end with their heroes maimed, insane, or dead, and Promising Young Woman is no exception.

Put that way, it’s a no-brainer that Carey Mulligan‘s character dies at the end of Promising Young Woman. But people aren’t used to tragedies these days. Heroes don’t die, they get six movies and a TV show. Or they retire and come out of retirement less than a year later. Or they do die—but wait, no, actually, it was all a clever ruse, there they are, just in time to save the day.

And so, the Promising Young Woman ending has become controversial. How dare writer/director Emerald Fennell kill off our bubble gum-snapping, hot-pink lipstick-wearing heroine, while her polo-wearing perps get to go on living? Where’s our high-heeled-boot-stepping-over-a-dead-man moment of triumph? Our Ana-de-Armas-sipping-coffee-while-Chris-Evans-goes-to-jail victory lap?

I admit I fell into that mindset the first time I watched Fennell’s film. My brain refused to process Mulligan’s lifeless hand, still rocking those iconic pastel rainbow nails. It was a trick, surely. One of those injections that makes your body seem lifeless, maybe, or a body swap-out, like they did in A Simple Favor. Even when her body burned—set aflame by the man who determinedly choked the life out of her (Chris Lowell) and his idiot dude-bro buddy (Max Greenfield)—I held on to hope that Cassie Thomas had found a way to win. It was only after watching the film a second time that I realized I’d missed the point.

Cassie (Mulligan) was once a promising young woman. (Incidentally, “promising young man” was how Brock Turner, the Stanford student accused of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, was often described.) She was at the top of her class at medical school and on her way to becoming a doctor. Then her friend Nina got raped while she was passed out drunk at a party by a man named Al Monroe (Lowell), while his buddies watched. Nina dropped out of school, and Cassie dropped out to take care of her. But Nina, haunted by her trauma, eventually kills herself. And Cassie, in turn, becomes an angry shell of a person. She spends her days working in a coffee shop and her nights tormenting guys who take advantage of drunk girls. When she runs into an old classmate named Ryan (Bo Burnham), who tells her how well Al Monroe is doing, she hatches a plan of revenge. It’s not just Al she wants to punish, it’s everyone who helped him get away with it.

As she carries out this plan, a few unexpected things happen. First, she starts to fall for Ryan, the aforementioned classmate. Then she has a jarring experience with Al Monroe’s defense lawyer, who deeply regrets his actions, so much so that she forgives him. Finally, she has a heart-to-heart with Nina’s mother (the wonderful Molly Shannon), who straight-up pleads with her stop.

“It’s not good for Nina, and it’s not good for you,” Mrs. Fisher says, frankly. “Move on, please. For all of us.”

So Cassie does.

Fennell hands her main character the keys to heal from her all-consuming rage and grief, and, for a moment, she takes them. She deletes her social media accounts, throws away her hit list, and allows herself to fully trust the man she loves. But when she’s tempted to return to her old, destructive ways—when Fennell dangles that carrot in front of her—she isn’t quite strong enough to resist.

One of Cassie’s revenge victims, Madison (Alison Brie), comes to her with what will ultimately be Cassie’s downfall: A tape. Unbeknownst to Cassie, someone recorded Nina’s assault and sent the video around the school. Madison still has the video on an old cell phone.

The moment that Madison places the phone on the table, Cassie’s eyes are glued to it. Her hand shakes as she reaches for it, the way an alcoholic’s hand might shake as they pick up a drink after years of sobriety. You’re screaming at your screen for her to put it down, to walk away, but she’s already gone.

Maybe if she hadn’t seen Ryan on the recording, laughing as he watches Nina’s rape (which, smartly, we hear rather than see), she still could have found a way to heal. We’ll never know. The tape was a test to see if Cassie could really and truly move on, and she failed. Cassie knowingly throws away her life—knowingly walks away from her family, from Ryan, from happiness—because she isn’t strong enough to do what Nina’s own mother asked her to do: Let it go.

This is not to say Cassie’s inability to let go of her anger is not understandable. On the contrary, it’s completely understandable. That’s what makes it a tragedy. Rape culture is a brutal,  unrelenting, mind-bogglingly unfair reality. But Cassie—despite her terrible, awful, unjust circumstances—still could have found a way out.

That said, she’s not the only one with a lesson to learn. Obviously, those who were complicit in Nina’s assault are in the wrong, and they all get punished for it, too. Here’s where the film veers into the fantasy fulfillment the revenge genre is known for. In this way, Fennell does try to have her cake and eat it too. Al Monroe and his buddies get busted, thanks to a letter Cassie wrote instructing the defense lawyer to deliver the tape to the police in the event of her disappearance. Perhaps that’s why some have failed to see the tragic, but ultimately brilliant nature of the Promising Young Woman ending. It would have been too cruel to let Al Monroe and his buddies get away with rape and murder. We get to see them arrested—and to see Cassie’s scheduled winking face text message to Ryan—and it is a moment of satisfaction.

But it is not a moment of victory. Cassie is gone, her future destroyed, her parents’ lives ruined. She rejected the morale she was meant to embrace, and so she must pay the ultimate price. Had Cassie successfully tattooed Nina’s name on Al Monroe and lived, the film would have felt pointless. Either you let go of your vengeance and live, or you let revenge consume you and you die. You can’t have it both ways.

Most modern-day filmmakers choose the first way: the happy ending. Fennell opted for a Shakespearean tragedy. (She even broke her story down into five acts, the bard’s preferred story structure.) Promising Young Woman was never a movie about winning. It was a movie about healing. And, tragically, our hero can’t bring herself to heal.

Where to watch Promising Young Woman