‘Promising Young Woman’: a prescient film about how elite universities shield rapists

You may have come across various reels in your Instagram feed over the past few weeks featuring the film Promising Young Woman, a feature in which Carey Mulligan plays a woman who takes revenge on the allies of rape culture, fully aware that her vendetta will cut short her promising future. The reason Emerald Fennell’s movie has returned to the zeitgeist six years after its release is that it bears striking similarities to the Cornell case, in which a former student at that prestigious university reported she had been gang-raped and assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity.

Both the student body and faculty say the university administration has been negligent and unjust, noting that none of the seven accused has faced criminal charges. In other words: Cornell’s leaders prioritized the university’s and the fraternities’ reputations over students’ safety. That is something Fennell’s film depicts perfectly.

An unjust justice for women

As experts interviewed by EL PAÍS point out, the Cornell case shows that sexual violence is systemic on these campuses. It also reveals that subsequent “institutional betrayal” remains a persistent problem that in (too) many cases goes unpunished. Social media users have not been indifferent to a movie released six years ago asking the same question posed today: what happens when an institution’s prestige collides with a complaint that calls into question the system’s ability to protect its students, and how promising men are better protected than promising women.

Mariola Cubells, an audiovisual content specialist, explains why the film has returned to public attention. “Submission has become an unspoken but central theme. Promising Young Woman puts on screen something that rarely happens: fear switching sides, the victim standing up and taking action,” she says, before recommending the British series Trust Me, which deals with a real case of drug-facilitated sexual assault by a taxi driver and a failed police and judicial investigation. In the series, a police officer, after interviewing the victim, says, visibly surprised, that he had never seen a victim behave that way. “They usually cry and are angry,” he says. When the woman is told that her tearless demeanor surprised him, she replies: “You told me you wanted facts, not tears.” With that line—and the officer’s astonishment at the absence of lamentations—the figure of the imperfect victim reemerges.

“The film dissects reality in a brutal way we can recognize. The justice system does not deliver justice to women. That’s why the film offers symbolic justice and we empathize with the protagonist, with whom we identify,” says María Castejón, a film critic and author.

And as Promising Young Woman points out, when justice arrives it is often late and leaves behind a trail of countless victims.

One of the most infuriating aspects of the Cornell case is the apparent absence of consequences and accountability for the men involved: most of them were allowed to minimize the repercussions by turning in essays, as if they were receiving a school punishment—an outcome that at 21 years old is an incomprehensible evasion of responsibility. It echoes the logic of Brock Turner’s father after Turner’s 2016 sexual assault at Stanford, who asked how a promising young man’s future could be ruined by “20 minutes of action.”

Those known as the Cornell Seven have achieved professional and personal success without the events, on the face of it, having any significant impact on their lives. In a memorable scene in Promising Young Woman, when the protagonist speaks with the university dean, she says her friend—the victim of the sexual assault—is not okay. Yet her attacker is. “I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that. So I suppose you did the right thing because, as you say, these men must be given the benefit of the doubt,” she says. Her line, thick with sarcasm, follows the dean’s alarming—and sadly familiar—response to why she did nothing when the friend reported the assault. “I just want to make one thing clear: none of us wants to admit when we’ve been vulnerable or made a bad choice. And those choices, those mistakes, can have devastating consequences. What do you expect me to do? Ruin a young man’s life every time we receive an accusation like this? I have to give the boy the benefit of the doubt, because everyone is innocent until proven guilty,” the dean says. “We get accusations like this all the time… one or two a week!” she adds.

Following the narrative promoted by those who excuse sexual assaults, a fraternity member’s future career is far more important than justice for the victims of the assault. In fact, the woman in the Cornell case has received countless death threats and insults online. On the other side of the scale, five of the seven accused have already completed their university degrees.

Both Promising Young Woman and the Cornell case prompt reflection on the consequences for a woman who comes forward and why doing so can be an extremely fraught decision—something that, despite daily news coverage, only survivors truly understand.

“A film cannot change the world, and indeed that is not its mission. However, Promising Young Woman examines what happens in a society where men are so protected. Society, deeply patriarchal, continues to question the victim, as we are seeing in the Cornell case and in thousands of other cases. The film is far ahead of the justice system, where feminism does not always permeate,” Castejón says. “The film put on the table—in images—a reality rarely or never told, and made us part of something quite revolutionary: a woman who avenges her friend with the only weapons she has; she sheds her fear, brings out the heavy artillery and exposes a gallery of characters who exist among us and who are evil,” adds Cubells.

Reality alarmingly resembles the movies, although the most worrying thing is that movies address problems that society still cannot resolve. Because Promising Young Woman is six years old but the dilemma it raises has existed for far longer. Both the film and what happened at Cornell beg the question: what value is placed on women’s potential compared with men’s? Will their futures ever be considered promising?

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