It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Genevieve Kosky.

Scott Tobias.

And Keith Phipps.

On last week's show, we talked about Mary Harron's American Psycho, a pitch-black satire of the 1980s that centers on a man who spends his days obsessing about image and is nights hunting down and murdering people, particularly women. Writer director Emerald Thinnell has said it's one of the films that inspired her debut feature, promising young woman, which starts off centered on a woman who goes out at night, hunting down and punishing men. Initially on the surface, these are very different films, where Patrick Bateman and American Psycho is a grotesquely rich businessman and a higher-powered job, who seems to do nothing but harass his secretary, adjust the pencils on his desk, and jockey for social position, Cassie and promising young woman is an under-employed, outwardly fairly cheery med school dropout, working at a coffee shop

and living at home with her despairing parents. At night, though, Cassie pretends to be drunk

in order to see which men try to take advantage of her. Then she does something with them.

Phinell deliberately glosses over the details. She shows one encounter where Cassie just lectures

the man who's trying to assault her,

but in another case, she appears to be walking home after one of these encounters bloody and sated,

and she keeps a little notebook with tick marks in different colors that strongly implies some of these encounters end differently from others. Cassie, it turns out, is avenging her best friend

Nina, who was raped at a party while drunk and then was unable

to secure any sort of help from law enforcement or the administration at their med school.

Eventually, she died.

The details are kept obscure.

The implication is that she either committed suicide or overdosed.

Cassie has been left traumatized and angry, but she appears comparatively under control,

particularly when she starts a warm and loving

relationship with a former med school classmate named Ryan, played by Bo Burnham. Then a series of

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