Carey Mul­li­gan takes revenge in the Promis­ing Young Woman trailer

The 2020 Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val kicks off in just over a month, which means that for those of us not mak­ing the trek to Park City this time around, the most won­der­ful time of the year has already begun. That’s right: trail­er sea­son is here, as the stu­dios com­pete to drum up advance buzz for their hottest titles with sneak peeks of the major indie releas­es fill­ing out the year to come.

Get­ting in on the ear­li­er side is Promis­ing Young Woman, an off-kil­ter rape-revenge thriller with a black­ly com­ic fem­i­nist edge. If the par­tic­u­lars of that sen­tence seem to give off major Killing Eve vibes, that’s not just your imag­i­na­tion – it’s the fea­ture direct­ing debut of the mag­nif­i­cent­ly named Emer­ald Fen­nell, who stepped in as showrun­ner for the sec­ond series of the pop­u­lar show.

We first see the Carey Mul­li­gan-played Cassie in a wor­ri­some state, drunk and alone and hun­gri­ly eyed by men. One of them brings her home, and it appears like a regret­tably famil­iar script is about to play out, until Cassie snaps out of it and reveals her­self to be far more than her would-be rapist had bar­gained for.

She makes a habit out of bait­ing men (an ensem­ble of unsus­pect­ing creeps under the impres­sion they’re nice guys that includes Adam Brody, Bo Burn­ham, Christo­pher Mintz-Plasse and Sam Richard­son) and dis­patch­ing them once they invari­ably try to take advan­tage of her. But this behav­ior may steam from some repressed trau­ma in her own past; we get snip­pets of an accu­sa­tion levied dur­ing her school days, the echoes of which still ring in her ears in the present.

From the cheeky string cov­er of Brit­ney Spears’ ​‘Tox­ic’ to the latex nurse get­up, the trail­er teas­es a wicked spin on the tired tropes of the woman in per­il, the con­trite vio­la­tor, and the aveng­ing angel. Watch your back, Ms 45.

Promis­ing Young Woman comes to the­aters in the US on 17 April, 2020. A UK date has yet to be set.