'Saltburn' Packs A Punch, Even If The Blow Isn't Nearly Hard Enough
When Emerald Fennell accepted her BAFTA for writing Promising Young Woman in 2021 (virtually, as the country was in lockdown at the time), she was sitting in a glamorous hotel room, complete with a grand piano just over her shoulder. The sudden display of glamour (Fennell clarified she was in a hotel room and not her own home) felt pointed on a night where the top awards went to films and performances about society’s most impoverished and marginalized, but class has clearly been on Fennell’s mind thereafter; her next project, Saltburn, a pop-fuelled riff on Brideshead Revisited, was announced early the following year. Maybe the whole project was just so something else would come up when you googled “Emerald Fennell Rich.”
After a difficult, alienating first term at his elitist Oxford college, Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) falls in with the tremendously cool and disgustingly rich crowd of Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). The Merseyside-raised outsider becomes infatuated with everything Felix – his good looks, his affable charm, his social (and literal) currency, blurring the line between homosocial and fully romantic attraction. Felix soon invites Oliver to stay at his ma-hoosive country estate for summer, where he gets to see how the other half (well, more like the other 0.2%) lives.
As Oliver plainly asserts a difficult childhood being raised by addicts, there are shades of The Talented Mr Ripley’s desires for class ascension and performing a pitiable past. But with its dark academia setting, this is also Donna Tartt’s The Secret History through and through, with jaded, megarich youth and inflexible family burdens – challenged by an ambiguous outsider infiltrating their ranks. But in trying to mesh its interconnected influences, Saltburn realizes too late that it needs to come up with its own messages, resulting in a film that delights with dark, blunt frivolity but fails to cogently deconstruct its aristocratic setting.
