Promising Young Woman is always entertaining and it will linger for a long, long time.

As satire, Woman‘s first two acts are fun but broad: a winky, wildly stylized slice of girl-powered revenge porn. And Mulligan, who’s always given smart, delicately shaded performances in movies like Far from the Madding Crowd and An Education (she was great in 2018’s underseen Wildlife) is an entirely different animal here: furious, damaged, ferociously funny.

Fennell complicates matters throughout, toying with our identification by pushing Cassie’s tactics into some uncomfortably nasty places, even as she slowly reveals her motives.

Promising Young Woman builds to a truly shocking climax that delivers Fennell’s themes with a dark and twisted sense of humour—and justice. It’s a clever and unexpected turn in a film full of surprises.

Fennell’s film could be called a polemic, but dramatically it’s so sharply and boldly laid out that its narrative shocks rule the day. It’s jolting to witness how it refuses to let anyone off the hook.