Carey Mulligan has spent her career playing buttoned-up types or damaged ingenues, so it’s exciting to see her unleashed and angry in Promising Young Woman. Mulligan stars in the darkly comic thriller as a traumatized woman who leads a double life taking revenge on self-declared “nice guys” who are actually would-be assaulters. Watch the Promising Young Woman trailer below.

Promising Young Woman Trailer

Written and directed by Killing Eve head writer Emerald Fennell in her feature directorial debut, Promising Young Woman looks like it has all the razor-sharp style and feminist rage of the critically acclaimed BBC America series, with the topical issue of sexual assault at its core. Coyly named after the descriptor used for the Stanford swimmer rapist Brock Turner (a judge had opined the future of a “promising young man”), Promising Young Woman looks to be the perfect rape revenge thriller for modern times. Hard Candy had pulled off the conceit before — a young woman plays at being vulnerable to lure in a predator and violently turn the tables against him — but Promising Young Woman is less horror film and more cathartic black comedy, with Mulligan leading the film with a twinkle in her eye and more pep than we’ve seen from her in the last decade.

Promising Young Woman also stars Bo Burnham, in his first major acting role since directing the award winning Eighth Grade, along with Alison Brie (GLOW), Connie Britton (American Horror Story), Adam Brody (Ready or Not), Jennifer Coolidge (2 Broke Girls), Laverne Cox (Orange is the New Black), Max Greenfield (New Girl), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World), Sam Richardson (Detroiters), and Molly Shannon (Divorce).

Here is the synopsis for Promising Young Woman:

From visionary director Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve) comes a delicious new take on revenge. Everyone said Cassie (Carey Mulligan) 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.

Promising Young Woman hits theaters on April 17, 2020.