I finally checked out one of last year’s most divisive and talked about movies, and it was… an experience, even if I find it hard to say whether the film was actually good or not, underneath all that luscious imagery and transgressive moments.
I didn’t come up with this comparison myself, but it feels appropriate: Saltburn to The Talented Mr. Ripley is basically what Cruel Intentions is to Dangerous Liaisons. Emerald Fennell’s thriller about sexual obsession, class envy and social climbing is trashy, lurid, a lot more superficial and shallow than its influences, but also undeniably pleasurable in the moment.
Brideshead Revisited is another significant reference point, acknowledged by the movie with a couple of not-so-subtle nods. Just as in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, the protagonist of Saltburn is a class outsider besotted with a wealthy family and their luxurious manor house. Here it’s Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), an awkward misfit who arrives at Oxford in 2006 to find himself invisible among the beautiful, moneyed elites. His misery and loneliness is relieved when he strikes an unlikely friendship with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a popular, movie star-gorgeous son of the upper classes who moves through life with languor and careless ease of the truly privileged.
This connection is in danger of fizzling out, when Oliver’s confession of a personal tragedy pokes at Felix’s sense of noblesse oblige. It prompts him to invite Oliver to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s aristocratic abode. There, Oliver meets the Catton family and their dependents, including Felix’s eccentric parents, his sister, a poor cousin removed from the rest of the family by being a mixed race American, and an artsy friend of Felix’s mother whose personal life is a series of car crashes. He also gets a full sense of what the inherited wealth truly means, right from the scene where Felix ushers Oliver from one richly decorated room to another, casually pointing out priceless family treasures along the way.
As a protagonist, Oliver remains an opaque, unknowable character whose true motivations are never fully clear, until they’re spelled out in giant capital letters with neon crayons at the very end of the movie. He’s compelling mostly thanks to Barry Keoghan and his endlessly fascinating face, which belongs in that grey area between almost attractive and off-putting. He has a strange ability to look like a guileless twelve-year-old boy one moment, then a jaded forty-year-old in the next. Of the supporting cast, Rosamund Pike is pitch-perfect as Felix’s glamorous, vacuous mother Elspeth, capturing the casual cruelty and disconnect from everything resembling the real world with comical perfection. Archie Madekwe is another standout as bitchy cousin Farleigh, who quickly reveals himself as Oliver’s competition at Saltburn.
There’s a fair share of sticking knives into the rich, but Saltburn never really has anything substantial to say about class, especially when compared to the recent satirical films like Parasite or Triangle of Sadness. What it does have in spades is style, bravura and vibes, conjuring up one seductive, decadent image after another, whether it lingers on Felix’s body in lascivious close-ups or takes in a debauched karaoke session. It expresses desire and intoxication through a series of provocative scenes calculated to shock; I wasn’t sure whether to giggle at their sheer silliness or applaud Fennell for really going there, bodily fluids and all.
By the end of the movie I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. I did feel that it shot itself in the foot by the finish line, by spelling out and underlining what might have been better off left ambiguous. But then is this lack of subtlety a real downside in a film that wouldn’t know subtlety to begin with? Does its stunning cinematography, boldness and verve make up for predictable plot, thin characters, and lack of anything interesting to say? I’d probably need another watch to figure that out, but in any case I can’t help but admire the movie’s anarchic, ballsy spirit. One thing I can say, it’s never boring.
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