Carey Mulligan is a fine actress but I believe she has never been one of the main female faces in the Hollywood community even though she has participated in several good films. I first noticed this actress several years ago when watching The Great Gatsby and I enjoyed her performance as a secondary character. I also remember watching at least 2 other films with her, one was called An Education, and the other one was Never Let Me go. She did a fine job in all of them.
When I realized she was going to play the main character is Promising Young Woman I knew I had to watch this film. The characters she has played in the movies I mentioned above were all kind of innocent. She has an innocent face which should make it easy to play that type of role. However, in Promising Young Woman, she is not innocent in the least, in fact, she is the complete opposite of innocence.
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The story in this movie is about a woman with obvious depression symptoms. She has a dead-end job, doesn't take measures to improve her income, and seems to have given up on life for the most part. The only time when she shows initiative is with the mysterious activities she does at night. Rest assured, she isn't practicing prostitution and this isn't a fantasy movie so forget about vampires or things like that.
She is just trying to fix a systemic problem doing individual interactions in a particular context that will most likely end up being irrelevant in the great scheme of things. However, since she has a deeply embedded sense of frustration, she just keeps doing this over and over again. Until one day, she casually discovers a piece of information that could allow her to settle scores in an extreme way with certain people that were very irresponsible in the past, to say it nicely.
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This woman is consumed by rage and a thirst for revenge, so it is very hard for her to live a normal life. As the minutes advance, we will discover what really happened to make her like that, we will also see an attempt to live a normal life, and ultimately there will be an intense ending. The only doubt I had left is related to what actually happened in her night activities that were shown at the beginning of the film. The movie isn't clear what really happens when she is in a bad mood. I think she was capable of much more than what the films shows. The ending also proves she always calculated her plans very carefully.
If you enjoy the thriller genre then this movie would be an excellent choice to watch. I don't even remember when was the last time I watched a thriller better than this one so make sure to check it out. This is also a movie about revenge so there will be some violence and cruel attitudes from several characters.
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The best
- Excellent acting from a more mature Carey Mulligan proving she can play serious and dark roles.
- Very entertaining thriller for adults that will keep the viewer interested for the entire duration of the film.
The worst
- Some of her far fetched plans worked out too perfectly at the beginning. Which was very unlikely to happen.
More information: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9620292/ Review: AAA In numbers: 8.5/10