Even As a Man I Can Relate

First off, this is a brilliant film, and one of the few in recent times that I believe will be regarded as a classic in years/decades to come.

But what I particularly appreciated about this film from a personal POV, is that the 'Promising Young Woman' is the lead character (i.e. Carey Mulligan), not the rape victim/friend who committed suicide, and although she wasn't *personally* victimised (her friend was), her life has been *ruined* because of the guilt/remorse she feels about what happened to her friend (even though she wasn't remotely responsible for what happened). She basically dropped out of an extremely promising medical career and ended up in a dead-end tertiary job (as a barista) because of the effect her friend's trauma/suicide had on her (whilst other men and women who were actually witness to, and part of, the rape itself, continued to have successful and ostensibly happy careers and lives).

I've been in a similar situation, where I felt compelled to essentially 'drop-out' of a relatively promising career partly because I took the way other people had been treated to heart, and although I knew I wasn't personally to blame, I still felt like part of the system that didn't do enough to effectively *prevent* the trauma/abuse/injustice that occurred (even though I felt I had done everything within my capacity at the time, and I believed I had acted fairly under all circumstances). And this is the point, even when one does the right thing, one can still feel that one is in the wrong because of the way things have turned out for other people.