Saltburn

Directed by: Emerald Fennell
Distributed by: Amazon MGM Studios

Written by Anna Harrison

65/100

Where do I even begin with “Saltburn”?

Well, for simplicity’s sake, let’s just lay out the premise. Oliver (Barry Keoghan) is a student at Oxford. I believe he’s supposed to be a freshman, though there’s no way anyone is buying that and it’s never specified, at least as far as I can recall. Oliver, through several strokes of luck, becomes friends with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a member of the old aristocracy, and gets an invite to Felix’s familial home, Saltburn. “Brideshead Revisited,” 2000s style. 

Writer and director Emerald Fennell, who made a splash with 2020’s “Promising Young Woman,” sets out to provoke here just as she did in her debut, but while “Promising Young Woman”—for all its flaws—had a clear goal in mind, whereas “Saltburn” seems to enjoy provocation for provocation’s sake. Films don’t need a goal, a purpose, or what have you, but it seems clear that Fennell wants “Saltburn” to mean something, she just doesn’t know what. The most obvious answer is that she set out to do some class commentary, but succeeds only at poking some pleasant fun; there’s no skewering here. (Nor is there, as Twitter might have you believe, an anti-working class bent, as to believe so means you missed a rather significant reveal partway through the movie.) 

The insidiousness of the Catton family is a gentle one: Rosamund Pike’s Elspeth Catton, the matriarch of the family, takes in less fortunate friends before her husband ships them off in the middle of the night once she grows tired, or once the friends grow less interesting in their misery, as the case may be; daughter Venetia (Alison Oliver) copes with boredom by bulimia and sex; Felix brings a rotating parade of lonely souls, of which Oliver is the latest one, to Saltburn before discarding them when he becomes bored, and they all play at being one big happy family. There are comments here and there about how Felix can never remember the footmen’s names, and a few jibes about their mixed-race cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) but Fennell is less interested in airing out the Catton’s dirty laundry and more interested in… well, I suppose it’s Oliver, but she falls short there.

Is Oliver a working class boy seduced by his idolatry of wealth, as it seems at the beginning of the film, or is he a simple sociopath? The hero or the villain? His obsession with Felix takes him to all sorts of extremes, and he will lie, flirt, and threaten in order to keep his good standing with the eldest Catton child, but is it Felix or the money he loves? Fennell, it seems, wants to have her cake and eat it too: while she attempts to layer in shades of gray to Ollie, the film’s final “twist” (if it can be called that) seems to unravel all those earlier attempts in favor of a much less interesting, much simpler take, even if that final, triumphant (nude) dance scene almost makes up for what came just before. In this twist, Fennell also undermines some of her earlier scenes, which take care to show at least some amount of nuance in Oliver and his relationship to the Catton family, as if she only committed three-quarters of the way through the writing process and didn’t bother to go back and make sure what came before lined up. Keoghan gives his all and then some in his performance, but he is straining to round out a character whose parts don’t add up. It’s a shame, too, because everything up to that moment is, at the very least, interesting, yet that “gotcha” moment undoes much of the goodwill the previous hour-and-a-half built up.

Still, there can be no doubt that Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren’s visual work hold up. “Saltburn” is meticulous in its craft, with each frame calculated and calibrated with a fine-tooth comb—Fennell conjures up a parade of evocative (though largely meaningless) images, from Oliver climbing into Felix’s vacated tub (yes, a tub he has just masturbated in) to a frantic, sweaty birthday party the Cattons throw for their guest. That, combined with Anthony Willis’s score, does a lot to hide the flaws through the rest of the film. It’s a shame that Fennell has now cemented her tendency to shoot herself in the foot in the third act, as she shows a real eye for beauty and coaxes good performances out of her actors (Pike, in particular, is a joy to watch); given a script by someone other than herself, I imagine she could really make something special—hell, if she had just stuck the landing a bit more here, it could have been that. Someone take her pen and paper away.

“Saltburn” Trailer

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