The Director Tackling the Dark Side of Millennial Desire

Before Barbie, the most subversively pink product to combust its way through Hollywood of late was Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, a pastel-hued rape-revenge thriller with a sting in its tail. Fennell loves to manipulate cinematic tropes into discomfiting shapes. Her debut feature, which starred Carey Mulligan as a med-school dropout on a mission to ensnare predatory men, layered jagged themes—trauma, violence, female rage—with beguiling, poppy visuals. Promising Young Woman, while alarming some critics, was widely praised as a fascinating excavation of rape culture. And yet, by winking in the film at well-known touchstones of the aughts, Fennell seemed to be doing something else too: digging into recent history until she found the rotten foundations underneath.

The movie debuted at Sundance in January 2020. Over the course of about 18 months, Fennell went into lockdown with her baby, embarked on a vigorous press campaign conducted almost entirely over Zoom, became the first British woman to be nominated for a directing Oscar, got pregnant with her second child, and then won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the stilted, socially distancedstyle , playing a character who was part Factory girl, part murderous fembot.