'Promising Young Woman' Twist Ending Explained By Director Emerald Fennell - Spoilers Ahead!

SPOILER ALERT – This post contains major spoilers for the movie Promising Young Woman, so beware of reading any further!

The movie Promising Young Woman is now available to watch at home and people are definitely going to be shocked by the film’s twist ending.

Carey Mulligan stars in the movie as Cassie, who everyone said was a promising young woman… until a mysterious event abruptly derailed her future. But nothing in Cassie’s life is what it appears to be: she’s wickedly smart, tantalizingly cunning, and she’s living a secret double life by night. Now, an unexpected encounter is about to give Cassie a chance to right the wrongs of the past in this thrilling and wildly entertaining story.

Killing Eve writer and executive producer Emerald Fennell made her feature film writing and directorial debut on the movie and she’s explaining that last scene in the movie.

Click inside to read the spoilers…

The movie follows Cassie while she fulfills a revenge plot against the people responsible for the rape of her best friend Nina and the injustices that led to her suicide.

Cassie and Nina were in med school together and when Nina dropped out to deal with the aftermath of her assault, Cassie left school to take care of her. She gets a job at a coffee shop and lives at home, but she spends her nights pretending to be drunk at clubs and confronts the men that take her home when they try to take advantage of her.

Cassie starts dating a former med school classmate, Ryan (Bo Burnham), but later learns that he was a bystander to Nina’s assault. After discovering this, she decides to end her revenge plot by going to the rapist’s bachelor party dressed as a stripper.

After drugging the other bachelor party guests, Cassie takes the rapist, Al (Chris Lowell), to the bedroom and handcuffs him to the bed. She tells him that she’s going to carve Nina’s name all over his body using a scalpel, but he gets one of his hands loose and overpowers Cassie. Al smothers Cassie to death with a pillow and then with the help of his friend, he burns her body the next morning.

Cassie set a plan in action in case she disappeared after the bachelor party and Al is arrested at his wedding.

Keep reading to find out what Emerald Fennell said about the ending…

“I had to be honest,” Emerald told Entertainment Weekly about the film’s ending. “It’s how the system works. The house always wins. For me, it would be an enormous injustice to be so honest the whole way through this movie and then have a Hollywood ending that also let us all off the hook.”

“It’s necessary for people think she’s resorting to violence, and that they want her to. Once the trailers were released, everyone assumed she was killing people, even though we didn’t see anything remotely like that,” Emerald continued.

Emerald said that she wrote the film with the intention of having the audience root for Cassie to pick up the scalpel in those final moments.

“It’s important that the audience wants her to pick up that scalpel. All of us do. By that stage, we’re ready. We’re primed for it,” Emerald said. “We might be frightened of her. It was important to me that the first moment that violence comes into it — this lie we’re all sold, that if you’re a woman in a revenge movie that you can just grab a machete [and end it] — what happens is, she loses. It felt, to me, incredibly untrue to give [her the upper hand].”

She added, “When I wrote it, in my mind I was thinking that there was a way of making this movie that’s like, ‘Hell yeah, stick it to the man!’ But the harder and more honest way, that hits you in a primal way, is [asking] what happens when you’re in a room with a man and they’re frightened of you and you have a weapon?”

“We need to talk about this stuff. I didn’t want people to leave thinking it was fixed,” she concluded.

You can rent Promising Young Woman right now wherever you get your digital movies!