Searching for Feminist Catharsis: Promising Young Woman vs Candyman

Warning: Spoilers

The year is 2020. The #MeToo and the #BlackLivesMatter movements have been raging for several years at this point, with feminist consciousness coming into mainstream awareness, and women are hungry for something, somewhere, to place their rage.

Then an advertisement appears, it’s a movie, and it looks like it’s about a woman who takes revenge upon rapists. Appearing drugged out and abandoned in a club, any man who drags her to his home clearly has nefarious intentions, this is how this woman lures men in order to take revenge. This is how we get introduced to the 2020 film Promising Young Woman.

I remember being a feminist online during those days, and conversations abounded about whether or not this would be a feminist film, eventually turning into discussions about whether or not the film met their expectations. I personally found the film valuable, but it did not meet my expectations for the feeling of catharsis that I was expecting, and that is what I’m going to dissect here.

Why Promising Young Woman doesn’t deliver catharsis

Firstly, I blame the marketing. The trailer for Promising Young Woman made it seem like this would be a tale of women’s revenge against rapists, and it was, but how it went about it is remarkably different from how the trailer implies the rapists would meet justice. In the trailer, we are left to assume the main character Cassie doles out justice the old-fashioned vigilante way, luring rapists into her trap and then hurting them. Personally, I was excited for a film to address and satisfy women’s, and my own, anger and rage regarding rape and men’s seemingly untouchable ability to get away with raping women.

Promising Young Woman is about Cassie Thomas whose best friend Nina Fisher is raped by a classmate in university. The rape is filmed by his friends, as they watch cheering on the assault. Nina brings a complaint to the University but it is dismissed, Nina drops out and then commits suicide. This obviously and naturally devastates Cassie, and it is from this experience that she decides to take her revenge.

I found the way that Cassie gets damaged vicariously from the attack on her friend handled very touchingly. I liked that the harms of rape effecting not only the primary victim but those who love them is addressed in this film, and when her parents say that they miss who Cassie was before all of this, I cried. I too, miss myself before the rage. It was a poignant moment based in truth that I think is a strength in this movie.

What doesn’t work for me is finding out that in fact, the men Cassie lures home via her drunk girl wasted and alone at a bar act, just get a stern talking to. It’s anti-climactic. A lecture to a rapist feels uneven in the harms.  Where is the revenge again? Where is my feminist vigilante I was hoping to cheer on? In fact, the way Cassie finally brings the men to justice includes her being murdered by one of them. So, the only death in this film ends up being hers? This sends the message that women’s rage is punished by death, there is no healing, and the justice is doled out via Cassie sending the evidence of the rape to the police and engaging with the system.

In fact, the harshest punishment Cassie doles out in this film is actually to the other women in this film. Madison McPhee, a fellow classmate who victim blamed Nina is over-served alcohol and led to believe she gets assaulted, and then the Dean of the university who dismissed Nina’s case, Elizabeth Walker, has her daughter taken to a frat house and then told about it, leading her to feel concern for her own daughters safety.

It irks me beyond belief that the actual wannabe rapists get a lecture, and emotional harm is doled out to other women caught in the same sexist woman-hating society that Cassie is.

Another aspect I think Promising Young Women does well is showing that even the nice guys are complicit. The love interest Ryan that Cassie meets at her coffee shop job, ends up being one of the men cheering on the rape. I think that aspect of rape culture is one of the most terrifying, that whole “who can you trust” feeling that women are caught in, where even those we want to project romance and safety onto can be the most dangerous.

The fact that Cassie in her quest for revenge is murdered however makes this film seem to be more targeted to men, a kind of didactic message to say ‘see how terrible life is for women’, which sure, I can get behind that kind of message, but the problem was it was marketed to women as a revenge fantasy, and instead women received a reminder of our doom.

Surprisingly, the catharsis I was promised but that Promising Young Woman ultimately failed to deliver was found in the most unexpected of films, the 2021 Candyman sequel!

Candyman 2021 – Where true catharsis occurs

Nia DaCosta directed this film, and co-wrote it with Jordan Peele, and as I am a huge fan of anything Jordan Peele does, I awaited this film with anticipation and excitement. Having not watched the original 1992 Candyman film, I really wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew that Candyman is a character summoned by saying his name 5 times in a row into a mirror, but that is as far as my knowledge of Candyman went. I hadn’t seen any trailers so I went into this film blind, so the fist-bumping into the air, crying from relief catharsis the end of the film delivers came as a complete surprise to me.

Candyman was an artist, Daniel Robitaille, who was hired to paint a white client’s daughter. They fall in love and after her father finds out about the interracial affair, Daniel is chased down by a mob, his right hand sawed off, then he is smeared with honey attracting bees that sting him to death. The legend grows with the souls of other murdered innocent black men joining the candyman ‘hive’ as Daniel Robitaille now wanders as a hook-handed ghoul taking his revenge on anyone who summons him. As far as the plot of the 1992 film, Helen Lyle is an anthropology student who is researching urban legends and comes across the legend of Candyman and how Cabrini-Green residents use the Candyman legend to cope with racial inequality.

This personification of an oppressed groups rage is so clever, and is such a fantastic narrative device. These collective experiences of injustice taking the form of a myth and legend helps people experiencing the trauma of to say “this is happening to more than just me” and ‘i’m not alone’ and it is inside of this truth that Candyman delivers a more profound statement on justice than Promising Young Woman, who isolates Cassie and tells just her story.

The 2021 film follows artist Anthony McCoy who is searching for inspiration and finds it inside the now abandoned housing project Calibri-Green, and while there he meets William Burke, a man who as a child witnessed the police murder a black man, Sherman Fields, who was falsely accused of putting razor blades in children’s candy. William tells Anthony about the legend of Candyman. Inspired, Anthony creates art based on it, becoming more and more obsessed with Candyman and becoming increasingly erratic.

As Anthony descends into a kind of mania we are taken on the journey of Brianna Cartwright, Anthony’s girlfriend, fellow artist and gallery director. As Anthony descends into a Candyman-like physical transformation and finds out he is the baby Helen Lyle kidnapped in the 1992 film, Brianna becomes concerned and searches for him, going to William Burke to try to find him. William kidnaps Brianna and takes her to a church where he has Anthony. He cuts off Anthony’s right hand in an attempt to resurrect Candyman in order to take revenge on gentrifiers. William replaces Anthony’s hand with a hook and then calls the police in order to have Anthony wrongfully gunned down as another vengeful spirit to join the hive. Brianna stabs William to death with a pen, and I know from Jordan’s Peele prior movie “Get Out’ that the method of murder is not random, and that this is a commentary on that old saying “The pen is mightier than the sword”

Now I’m going to try to explain the ending of Candyman to you, but first I want you to know my whole body is now covered in goosebumps just trying to find the words to explain this to you. That sense of catharsis lingers inside of me, resurrected by the mere thought of the ending of this film.

Brianna tries to comfort Anthony as the police show up, and shoot Anthony dead. Brianna is put into the back of the cop car, and the police in the front seat attempt to intimidate Brianna into agreeing that the shooting was justified. Brianna instead looks into the rear-view mirror and summons Candyman, who appears and massacres the police. Goosebumps again. It is in this moment that my feeling of catharsis occurs. Anthony is now Candyman, swarming with bees, and he instructs Brianna to #telleveryone what she has witnessed.

The ending of Candyman so is devastatingly compelling and powerful. It is also I would argue a feminist kind of catharsis, as it is a woman who ultimately calls out for the demise of the corrupt police officers, even if it isn’t her who does the killing herself. The fact it is an annihilation of representations of the state who so often are not only failing to serve justice but are doling out the violence. The ending where Candyman tells Brianna #telleveryone is so powerful and it is a real world hashtag too, joining Kimberlé Crenshaw’s movement #SayHerName.

So where Promising Young Woman punishes the rage of injustice via Cassie’s murder, Candyman empowers the rage to kill. Where Promising Young Woman isolates the impact of rape to one woman, Candyman collectivises, mythologises and personifies the pain and reminds us this is happening over and over. Promising Young Woman turns to the authorities for help, where Candyman turns to the people. It is inside of these differences that Candyman delivers a much more powerful and poignant tale of oppression, revenge, and justice, and leave myself as the viewer with a fighting spirit.

It’s so very difficult when trying to talk and discuss and describe oppression, to fight oppression, to not just recreate the violence. Candyman does something else special there, which is the violence is mostly offscreen or at a distance. Nia DaCosta makes sure not to retraumatise us even when showing violence. I found that really smart, as opposed to the lengthy, realistic, and torturous scene where Cassie is strangled to death. That felt retraumatising to me as a woman already navigating a life of trauma repeated.

Nia DaCosta became the first black female director to debut at Number 1 in the US box office for this film, so not only is the film itself a tale of feminist catharsis, its feminist catharsis in real life too.

I highly recommend for the women searching for a moment of righteous rage, a sense of catharsis, a feeling of fighting oppression, to check out Candyman, and then make the men in your life watch Promising Young Woman.

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