The dark comedy “Promising Young Woman” is full of candy bright colors and luminous visuals, but you’re faced with the morbid reality of society normalizing date rape culture.

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According to ScienceDirect, date rape is a situation where a victim is taken advantage of in a social atmosphere, usually under the influence of alcohol or drugs to the point that they are incoherent and unable to give consent. Statistically, 80% of date rapes are perpetrated by an acquaintance, according to Women’s Health.

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“Promising Young Woman” stars Carey Mulligan — Daisy Buchanan from “The Great Gatsby” (2013) — as Cassandra Thomas, a woman who dropped out of medical school, and life in general, due to a friend committing suicide and her own personal traumatizing date rape experience.

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When Casandra, also known as Cassie, told her college dean about her own experience, the defendant was seen as the victim and she was seen as someone trying to “ruin a young man’s life.” 

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After dropping out, Cassie moved in with her parents and devotes her life to trolling potential rapists. Her targets would never consider themselves rapists though. In fact, they think of themselves as pretty nice guys who just want to “make sure she’s okay” — offering her a ride to see if she would like to stop by their place on the way home for one last drink. To see who will bite the bait, Cassie acts like she’s completely obliterated to appear vulnerable.

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One of the film’s staples is watching Cassie go from acting incoherent to stone-cold sober in the middle of someone pulling off her panties, who believes she is completely unconscious. Once the men realize she is sober, her targets waver as though they were the ones being victimized, stumbling on superficial excuses and asking Cassie to leave. She keeps a tally of her results in a notebook, color-coding experiences by how bad things get.

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At times, “Promising Young Woman” is a blithesome, artistic masterpiece. It’s a film that will leave you staying 20 minutes after the movie, pondering in your seat what you just watched. It’s a story about a woman wrecking her chosen form of vengeance upon an endless supply of men who are condemned as much for their dickishness as their predatory intentions.

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But, the film left me with a volcanic rage slowly boiling under my skin. The film slowly creates an unsettling tension throughout the entire movie and leaves you with an unresolvable feeling, which is very realistic to the feeling all these women are left with. Ultimately, it’s a characterization of a woman who is consumed by rage that might be righteous but that’s also completely taken over her existence.

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Mulligan is the perfect woman to play the part of Cassie, displaying her sweetheart smile like its a weapon, radiating an ominous vibe that makes her seem a little less like a girl with a death wish and more like someone who could doubtlessly intimidate the unknown men she ends up in a room with.

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The ending of “Promising Young Woman” confronts the tangled up question it circles throughout the film— one of reconciliation versus retribution and whether there’s any reward to holding on to rage forever, no matter how justified. It’s a question that is unfeasible to answer broadly, but the film’s conclusion is both immensely unsettling and upsetting, leaving me sick to my stomach but with a slight glimmer of justice.

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Director Emerald Fennell’s film is a vibrant, artistically accurate piece of work, but the feeling it brings is unsatisfying in a way. It’s an acceleration towards catastrophe when you’d like to see some kind of progress forward in the nauseating world of date rape culture — any progress at all really.