[imagesource: Merie Weismiller Wallace / Focus Features]

Promising Young Woman is one of the eight nominees for the Best Motion Picture category at the upcoming Academy Awards later this month.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great movie, of course. Never forget that The Blind Side, a truly horrific movie that won Sandra Bullock a Best Actress Oscar, was also nominated back in 2010.

Scoring a five-star review from The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, on the other hand, is no mean feat, so props to writer-director Emerald Fennell, and the cast and crew that pulled it off.

Bradshaw says Carey Mulligan’s “is demurely brilliant as the appropriately named Cassandra,” and calls the film a “playfully provocative and ingenious rape-revenge satire”:

The story proceeds in twist and turns and switchbacks; Mulligan is great at showing when Cassandra is in control of the situation and when she isn’t – and Anthony Willis’s ruthlessly effective musical score underlines both the horror and the sadness.

Time to see that trailer:

Other reviews have called Mulligan’s character a ‘toxic avenger,’ but I guess you can’t win them all.

More from the five-star review:

Mulligan has some great scenes – the most excruciating being when, for reasons not immediately obvious, she tries tempting a teenage girl into her car. I was on the edge of my seat for this, and so much else.

The promise of fear is fulfilled.

In total, the movie has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

We’ll find out on Sunday, April 25, how many of those Promising Young Woman takes home.

[source:guardian]