‘It's Every Guy's Worst Nightmare, Getting Accused Like That’, ‘Can You Guess What Every Girl's Worst Nightmare Is?’

Promising Young Woman (Fennell, 2020) is a dark comedy thriller film that follows Cassie, a young woman who seeks revenge on men who have wronged her and others. Cassie poses as a drunken party-goer and lures men into taking her home, only to confront them about their actions while sober. The film explores themes of sexual assault, misogyny and consent, and Cassie&s;s mission for justice is revealed to be personal after her best friend is a victim of sexual assault. We chose this film to observe how different elements such as music, costume, and types of shots as well as language contribute to the audience&s;s perception of male and female characters in this particular example. Although there are analyses of the film from a feminist and film studies viewpoints (see Shaw, 2021 ), there has so far been no stylistic analysis observing how the varied elements of the text contribute to the building of characters leading the audience to challenge misogyny and male aggressions, and question the portrayal of women in revenge films. This study draws on telecinematic stylistic frameworks such as McIntyre (2008) and Harrison ( 2020 ), detailing linguistic, para-linguistic, and non-linguistic feature of a multimodal text. We then delve deeper into the characterisation of the protagonist, Cassie, using a cross-linguistic transcript akin to McIntyre&s;s ( 2008 ), focusing on types of shots, costumes, intertextuality (Mason, 2019 ), and pictorial metaphors (Forceville, 2008 ) as cues of characterisation in multimodal texts as per Culpeper&s;s model ( 2001 ). Findings show that the formal visual features and the script confirm a deep-seated opposition between male and female characters, and thus assign a certain depiction of the woman-vigilante in media against the perpetrators’ representation.