There is something oddly relaxing about watching Promising Young Woman, which stars Carey Mulligan as Cassandra, a medical-school dropout turned feminist agent provocateur. By day, she works as a barista and lives a failure-to-launch life amid the pastels of her parents’ suburban spread; by night, she trawls bars and nightclubs, faking inebriation, looking for men who think they’re nice guys but who don’t hesitate to take advantage. Or to try, rather, because at a certain point in the evening — once they have her back in their apartments, once they’ve done something to explicitly cross the line into predation — she drops the blackout-drunk act and gives them the fright of their lives.

We see only one of these set pieces through to completion, with a creepy nerd named “Neil” (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) desperately backpedaling from his hoped-for conquest and Cassandra stalking triumphantly away through his beaded-curtain door. But early on we see the book she keeps, the colored lines and cross-throughs marking all of the encounters, and it’s clear that she’s supposed to have done this not five times or ten but hundreds and hundreds. And it always works, she claims. Not once, not ever, does the nice guy actually act like a gentleman and bring her home safely. He always tries to rape her.

Those hundreds of marks in the ledger are liberating for the viewer. They signify that we’re in the realm where the polemical blends into the fantastical, and so there’s no need for the viewer to keep up a running argument with the movie’s depiction of the conflict between the sexes, no need to treat this as a serious intervention in the debate over how to handle difficult issues of inebriation and consent.

In Promising Young Woman we’re not operating in the real world, but in a world where what Rolling Stone reported about University of Virginia frat boys and what Julie Swetnick alleged about Brett Kavanaugh was all completely true — true of them, and true of every college guy, most likely. Every man is a Harvey Weinstein waiting for an opportunity, every decent-seeming guy is probably at least a bystander to gang rape, the presumption of innocence is just the patriarchy’s defense attorney, and the only justice available for women is the vigilante variety, embodied in this case by a caustic Cassandra, her thespian skills and her makeup kit.

I should say in fairness that the movie does make it clear that its protagonist is psychologically unwell; she’s not a clear-conscience vigilante of the sort that Liam Neeson might be called upon to play, and the people trying to pull her back from the abyss (her father, her best friend’s mother, and for a time a nice-guy boyfriend) all have our provisional sympathy. Her quest for vengeance — for what sort of crime, the movie reveals only gradually, but readers of that retracted Rolling Stone story will not be surprised — is clearly also a quest for self-destruction, and we’re supposed to feel a bit queasy, not simply satisfied, as she cuts a swath through the stock villains of the campus-rape debate: a clueless administrator who can’t even remember accusers but thinks the accused deserve every courtesy; a gal-pal rape-enabler who victim-blames until she gets her own comeuppance; a once-cutthroat, now-repentant defense attorney who helped the awful guys get off.

But at the same time the movie never lets in any hint that maybe Cassandra’s whole world is a garish caricature — that the male of the species, as gross and sinful as we indubitably tend to be, wouldn’t really bat 1.000 in a nightclub ledger of predation, or that it’s the problem of mutual inebriation, not a criminal indifference to gang rape, that makes the policing of campus sexual misconduct such a fraught endeavor.

At the height of the Me Too era some contrarians worried that the purge of predators was going to have a chilling effect on relations between the sexes. I tended to disagree: The misbehavior and violence exposed by the movement was a rot that needed to be excised, and the decay in romantic culture was so far advanced that it was silly to worry about the side effects of necessary surgery. But if you imagined that Me Too proceeded from premises that were essentially anti-male, anti-sex, anti-human — well, then Promising Young Woman seems intent on proving all those fears correct.

Except that’s also why it’s strangely relaxing to watch — because even as it burns with an urgent misanthropy, a polemical despair, it feels so obviously unserious, its caricature of sexual relations so calculated, that you can’t really be all that frightened by the spirit that it represents. If relations between the sexes sink even lower than their current low point, and the failure to pair off leads us deeper into psychological and demographic turmoil, then the kind of candy-colored nihilism on display in this movie will rank pretty low on my list of culprits.