Meet the writer and director of the year's most talked-about movie, Promising Young Woman
Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan, is Emerald Fennell’s debut as a feature director — a ruthless, pitch-black story of revenge set in an off-kilter, fairytale world.
The germ of the idea for first lodged itself in Emerald Fennell’s mind six or seven years ago, at a dinner party she and her roommates were throwing for some old college friends in London. Everyone was sitting around the kitchen table, eating pasta, when one woman happened to mention a creepy encounter she’d had with a guy on the tube on her way over. The men at the table were shocked. The women were shocked that the men were shocked. What world did they live in? Apparently not one filled with creeps who followed you home, or groped you on public transport, or catcalled you and turned nasty when you ignored them.
In other words, the usual. But the men at this party might as well have been walking through a wardrobe into a land of perpetual winter. As women regaled the table with one gruesome story after another, gleefully besting one another’s floridly crappy experiences, they were shocked by the relentlessness of it all, and by the gallows humor and resignation in the women’s response. “They were just staggered,” Fennell told me when I met with her last winter. “And these were just the milder things.” One man said he grew up thinking everything was fine, and was just now realising it was only fine for him.
