Promising Young Woman

Many parts of writer/director Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman are howlingly funny but then they collide into moments of wrenching sobriety and pain, not unlike the brutally cockeyed psychodrama/love story Killing Eve, for which Fennell wrote.

In Promising Young Woman, Carrie Mulligan plays Cassie, a former medical school standout whose life was derailed by a sexual assault -- not hers, but that of a friend and classmate who never recovered. Cassie works at a coffee shop run by a supportive friend (Laverne Cox) and spends her evenings hunting down and entrapping men by pretending to be falling down drunk in bars. When they make their move she unleashes her ferocious malice on them.

A chance meeting with an amiable pediatrician (a charming Bo Burnham) gives the audience reason for hope for this woman who is being consumed by spite and regret right before our eyes. In this way, the film echoes the message in Michaela Coel's brilliant BBC series I May Destroy You.

Mulligan is wonderful as Cassie, an avenging angel whose cause is just but who is so prickly and barbed that the caring world can't get close to her.