10 WAY Better Endings For Recent Movies

Promising Young Woman is undeniably one of the most controversial and fiercely debated movies of the last year, with particular regard to its ending.

The film follows Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) as she plots revenge on Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), the man who raped her best friend Nina years earlier, as lead to Nina's suicide.

Cassie hatches her plan at the end of the movie, but in a shocking twist, she's overpowered by Al, who smothers her to death with a pillow and, with the help of his friend Joe (Max Greenfield), burns her corpse before going to his wedding.

It's a chilling outcome, albeit one which has its edges smoothed away by a tacked-on epilogue where it's revealed that Cassie had made elaborate arrangements to ensure Al would be caught in the event that he killed her.

Though it provides sure catharsis after Cassie's devastating demise, it's also incredibly convoluted, even silly, coming at the end of a film that had so much to say about the realities of women struggling to be believed and also male privilege.

It feels like a reshoot ending mandated by the studio, because when you look at the world today, isn't an ending where Al gets away with killing Cassie just a lot more realistic?

Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell later stated that she indeed originally intended to end the film with Cassie's murder, but at the behest of her financiers decided to make it slightly less depressing.