Warning: Major spoilers ahead.

As far as Emerald Fennell is concerned, you can feel however you want about Promising Young Woman .

What Ive realized this year and what I knew in my heart that Ive had to practice much more literally is that what people think of this movie is none of my business and completely their right, Fennell told me. There was a version of this movie that could have been made that would have been a lot less likely to have think pieces, and that would have, I hope, been good, too. But thats not what we wanted to make at all.

She knew the twisty rape-revenge comedy would piss off some people and leave others gleefully pumping their fists. Im in the latter camp . Fennells directorial debut, which she also wrote, is cunning and audacious, from its winky pastel palette to its take-no-prisoners finale. We root for Cassie Thomas (a career-best Carey Mulligan), the medical-school dropout at the films center, as she outwits male predators who assume they can take advantage of her, yet Fennell cleverly coils our allegiance by making Cassie a bit dastardly herself. When Cassie lets an old friend (Alison Brie) think shes been assaulted, or when she dupes an unsympathetic university administrator (Connie Britton) into believing her teenage daughter is vulnerable to the same horror, vengeance starts to feel thorny.

Promising Young Woman currently playing in select theaters and premiering on video-on-demand platforms Jan. 15 ends with Cassie dying at the hands of one of those predators, clean-cut Al Monroe (Chris Lowell), a classmate who raped Cassies longtime best friend, Nina, and effectively drove her to suicide. Al will go down for his crimes not because he violated Nina but because he murdered Cassie and burned her body with the help of his buddy (Max Greenfield). No one truly suffers for their sexual transgressions, and thats part of the point: Rapists often walk free while survivors absorb the resulting trauma. Having learned that her charming beau (Bo Burnham) was also culpable in Ninas assault, Cassie risks becoming even more of a shell of herself. She is shrewd enough to know that showing up at Als bachelor party to seek retribution might result in her death, but in some ways, Cassie had already died years ago alongside Nina, who was like a sister to her.

Fennell plants the seeds for this searing outcome until they bloom into a dark and thrilling tour de force. Curious about her process, I asked Fennell, who was also head writer on Season 2 of Killing Eve and portrays Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown, to break down the nitty-gritty of Woman via Zoom.

Most Hollywood movies do not use color to tell a story in such an active and detailed way. You bathe Promising Young Woman in baby blues and bright pinks. What was your thinking behind the specifics of that color scheme?

There was a few things. I think, firstly, I really wanted the whole film to feel part of Cassies life and Cassies journey. Shes learned to subvert her femininity and her prettiness and her blondness to effectively hide and mislead like lots of addicts do, actually. I very much think of her as an addict. And so shes just learned the tricks to keep things functioning on the surface, to stop people from asking too many questions. For me, if shes fluffy and pink and welcoming but shes boiling with this terrible rage, then I think it was important that the film itself reflected that, that it felt just as inviting as her and just as misleading as she is.

Theres definitely a way of making serious movies about serious things. I think that really bypasses the experience of a lot of people. A lot of nasty things happen in beautiful places. This is a movie about appearances being deceptive. And so it made sense to me that it would look and sound appealing. And from a practical point of view, I didnt want to make something didactic. We set out to make something that would stand on its own two feet as a thriller, as a dark comedy, as a romance. When I sent the script out to people, I sent it with a playlist featuring Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and with mood boards of how it would look. I wanted to be very clear that it wouldnt feel dour, it wouldnt feel preachy, and it would not let anyone off the hook.