TW: The following article contains details about assault and domestic violence

If you haven’t yet seen Promising Young Woman, now is the time for you to turn it on.

I truly wish I could say that Emerald Fennell’s Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman was becoming less relevant over time. Unfortunately, this story is one that is perhaps more relevant than ever.

The film follows Cassandra as she deals with the persistent grief around the death of her best friend, Nina. Nina was violated by a group of frat-house men, who filmed the assault and shared it publicly. When the university they all attended dismissed Nina’s complaint, Cassie loses Nina to suicide.

We never see the violence on screen, instead we’re front row for the human impact of that violence. The lives that were shattered, the inescapable grief, the sadness and harm that leaks into every life touched by an unimaginable and despicable act.

Despite being years on from the incident, Cassie still can’t grapple with the reality of the situation. But honestly, who could?

During the first half of the movie we follow Cassie as she confronts a slew of men who attempt to assault her, after she pretends to be incapacitated at bars after work. After they each take her back to their homes and attempt to assault her, she reveals she’s not actually incapacitated and confronts them about their actions.

The casting choices are deliberate. Men who fit neatly into the “Nice Guy” archetype like Adam Brody and Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Men who run scared the moment Cassie reveals she is awake and fully in control of her mind and body. It powerfully dispels the myth that all rapists are armed men in balaclavas hiding around the next street corner. Instead it highlights the terrifying lived experience of women: perpetrators most often look like perfectly normal people that walk amongst us every single day.

As Cassie continues to wrestle with the pervasive rape culture plaguing society, she spends the rest of the movie confronting those who are complicit in Nina’s assault and continued victimisation: from the men who committed the assault, those who stood by and did nothing and the women who blamed Nina for the violence she experienced.

Again we meet seemingly normal and reasonable people played by Alfred Molina, a defence lawyer, Connie Britton, the Dean of the university and Alison Brie, one of the female alum. They throw out statements like “benefit of the doubt”, “what would you have me do, ruin a young man’s life?”, “if you have a reputation”, “it’s crying wolf”, “when you get that drunk, things happen”. It’s a familiar and infuriating script laid bare.

If you’ve seen stills or clips of this movie circulating on social media in the wake of the Cornell 7, there is a reason why. Promising Young Woman is a film that was written near a decade ago and released in 2020. Yet the core storyline is so similar to that of the Cornell 7 that it’s maddening. Soul-sucking. An emotional wound that wears you down slowly. Because this pattern is so utterly predictable yet impossible to stop unless the systems with power start actually holding people to account – and not with essays, with actual real life consequences that match the harm caused.

Despite the breakdown, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this film. There are twists, turns and layers upon layers. And it’s not due to the familiarity of this story that I insist it's an essential watch. Instead, it’s because of the way this film makes you confront your own biases and how it takes you down the dangerous paths we force survivors to tread. It shows that good men vs bad men is not a binary, but rather a spectrum and that perpetrators can often wear a familiar face. Most of all, it makes audiences understand how even the smallest actions or inactions can make you complicit in a cycle of harm.

It was the early days of 2021 when Promising Young Woman hit Australian cinemas. A moment in time where it seemed like we were actually ready to have some of these tough conversations.

It was also in 2021 that Chanel Contos made headlines for her work around consent education. I still think about Chanel Contos’s Instagram polls. I vividly remember when someone shared them with me.

“Have you or has anyone close to you ever been sexually assaulted by someone who went to an all-boys school in Sydney?”

“If you went to an all-boys school in Sydney, do you think any of your friends has ever sexually assaulted someone?”

Somehow 200 people answered yes to knowing someone or having been assaulted themselves. Yet, only 50 believed they knew of a perpetrator.

It felt like we were moving, making progress. Like society was finally starting to make the connection between entitlement, powerful systems and violence. Now in 2026, as the headlines around femicide and assault continue to pile up, that spark of revolution is seemingly harder and harder to ignite.

But just know, it was a small group of student journalists who broke the news of the Cornell 7 to the masses, not the work of a billion-dollar masthead. Now, it’s an international story and the New York district attorney has reopened the case.

Sometimes it only takes a few of us – to stand up and say no more – for that flame to continue to burn.

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