(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple. Today: grieving people becoming vigilantes, but in a non-superhero-origin or action movie capacity)
Promising Young Woman - 2020, d. Emerald Fennell - amazonprime
Riders of Justice - 2020, d. Anders Thomas Jensen - rental
I had no expectations for Promising Young Woman. I hadn't even seen a trailer. All I knew was that Emerald Fennell won a best original screenplay Oscar, and her acceptance speech was a delight. Even with no expectations, this is still nothing at all what I was expecting. Somehow it's predictable and surprising at the same time. It deals with trauma and pain by placing it into a revenge fantasy, except it never goes full fantasy. There's always a grounding point.
It's uncomfortable, a raw nerve exposing just how constantly toxic a world women have to live in, where some guy can profess love to a woman and seconds later say the nastiest things to her. Or just walking down the street or driving your car gives men permission to say whatever they want to you. But, the "fantasy" here is Carey Mulligan's Cassie doesn't take it, at all. She knows the insecurity of men that drive them to their actions, and she stares them down, inured to the words, and ready for their violence, knowing that most men are opportunistic cowards.
Though brightly shot, vibrantly decorated, cast with many comedic performers, and very entertaining with Cassie's exceptional take-no-shit demeanour, this is a dark, dark movie. Underlying Cassie's inability to move on from her pain (her friend was gang raped in college and committed suicide, a loss Cassie's never recovered from), she also can't trust men to be anything other than their worst selves. Part of this leaves you questioning, for much of the film, whether she's wrong to have this attitude or absolutely correct. The film makes the obvious answer, and if you don't know what the obvious answer is then you're pretending you don't know what world we're living in.
Cassie wound up dropping out of school, working at a coffee shop, still living with her parents. She frequently spends her evening getting decked out in her best "party girl" dress-up - tight skirts, big hair, excessive make-up - and baiting specifically targeted men into thinking she's too drunk to take care of herself, too alone for anyone to notice, easy pickings... only to turn the tides on them once in their home. Vigilante justice.
He is/was just a stupid kid. He didn't do anything wrong. There's no proof. He's a good guy. It's just a he said/she said situation. What did she expect when she XYZ... and all the other excuses people give for having perpetrated assault or not believing someone has experienced assault (or not believing someone has perpetrated an assault). This film really pulls at those thread-thin excuses, and how people cling to them, showing the hypocrisy is borne out of lack of personal consequences.
What this film doesn't offer answers or corrections to the toxic world, but that's not its job. It's an expose. Very singularly it's a very personal journey for Mulligan's character, but what a character! Mulligan is superb. It's a surprisingly fleet-footed watch despite its subject matter, and it certainly sticks with you.
Riders of Justice has a much different impetus for its protagonist(s) to turn to vigilante justice, but it's similarly riding a fine tonal line that sees both charm and laughs from the performances and characters of the film, but the current underneath them is a deadly undertow threatening to pull them under into darkness.
The prologue to the film, oddly, feels like a Christmas fairy tale, as a young teen girl on the freshly snow-fallen streets of Tallinn, Estonia asks her grandfather for a new bike, but a blue one, not the red one available. Smash cut to a quick sequence of men in a truck in Denmark stealing a blue bike from the train station. That bike belonged to a young woman, Mathilde, and as a result the next day she needs to get a ride to school with her mother, Emma. But Emma, upset after just finding out from her husband, Markus, stationed in Afghanistan, has just agreed to another tour, convinces her to take the day off together. This puts them on a train later in the day.
Meanwhile, Otto and Lennart, deliver a presentation to their superiors showing that the algorithm they've devised has the potential to predict human behavior, to predict the future. We've seen this idea of determinism recently, in Devs and Westworld, but clearly their superiors have not seen these shows, and both are terminated from their job. Otto winds up on the same train as Mathilde and her mother - shopping bags in hand. Otto offers them his seat and then a tragic accident happens, killing Emma and about a dozen other passengers.
Otto, putting together evidence, is convinced that this wasn't happenstance, and the information he gathers with the help of Lennert, and stubborn, isolated hacker Emmenthaler, seems to point that it was an engineered accident by the biker gang "Riders of Justice" meant to take out a prime witness in a court case that would imprison their leader. The police don't buy into the improbable-but-possible scenario. Otto takes it upon himself to advise a returned Markus of the fact that his wife was killed by the "Riders of Justice", and together with Lennert and Emmenthaler, they plan their revenge.
It's a hell of a set-up and barely scratches to the surface of what is going on in this film. Where it could have been an easy riff on "a man with a certain set of skills" and his tech support buddies, instead it's a rather potent examination of trauma, post-traumatic stress, and grief, and how these emotions, when repressed turn into toxic attitudes that push people away. But the opposite becomes true, that in opening up to these experiences, that sharing and understanding can bring people together, however reticent and reluctant they might be.
A lot of bad things happen in this story, some of it happened before we even meet these characters, some of it happens on screen, and some of it the characters are the perpetrators of. It's not always easy to watch, or hear, but it does connect you to the events, and there's an intensity in figuring out just how to feel about everything you see and learn about these characters. But there's a beauty in the togetherness, and there's a catharsis not in the vengeance but in finding a family who see your rawest nerves and accept them.
The main cast, Mads Mikkelsen as Markus, Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Otto, Lars Brygmann as Lennart, Nicolas Bro as Emmenthaler, Andrea Heick Gadeberg as Mathilde are all wonderful in how they both mask and cannot mask their inner selves. There are layers in the perfomances that are so often understated until they explode out in ways sometimes hilarious, and others heart-wrenching.
With subject matter as complex as both these films are dealing with, it's remarkable how well they both manage to entertain in spite of the heavy weight the characters are carrying. These films are of a kind, and as we as a society get more liberated in discussing and examining mental health and trauma honestly, we're likely to see more of.
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