Even with our well-founded disgust at their privilege, ostentatiousness, and general lack of care for their fellow man, it’s hard not to find an allure in the ultra-rich, an envy at just how fun and easy their lives seem that acts as wish fulfilment for those of us looking in from the outside. It’s a dichotomy that has fuelled so much of film and TV culture over the last few years, but no-one has tried to balance the profanity and the pleasure of wealth in quite as direct terms as Emerald Fennell does in Saltburn. Her follow-up to her bold but polarising debut Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is even more muddled and rocky than its predecessor but, crucially, much funnier and much better looking.
Traveling back to the halcyon days of 2006/7, Saltburn riffs on Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr Ripley, introducing us to working-class scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) in his lonely first few weeks at Oxford University. Struggling to make friends, he eventually finds himself falling under the wing of Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a charming Casanova aristocrat who invites Oliver to stay with him and his may-as-well-be-royal family at his palatial estate, Saltburn. In short order, Oliver has developed a psychosexual obsession with Felix, coming up with increasingly twisted and perverted ways to become a permanent fixture in the Catton household.
It’s hard to talk about where Saltburn is going, thematically, without diving deep into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that Fennell’s satire doesn’t always take the easiest or most obvious targets, instead setting her sights somewhere more intriguingly spiteful. It feels genuinely novel for this to not just be an ‘eat the rich’ parable after getting so many of them in the last 18 months and, even if the story itself ends up developing in some pretty predictable ways, there’s a wicked streak here that retains a bite right to the end.
Even when Fennell’s script is just making jokes about how out of touch the rich are, Saltburn is still pretty consistently funny, the lion’s share of the laughs going to Rosamund Pike as Felix’s ex-model mother Lady Elsbeth, whose insulation from reality makes her both an idiot and incredibly casually cruel. The characters of Saltburn are mostly a gaggle of grotesque freaks, which is certainly entertaining, but not every performance can tap into that as successfully as Pike does.
Most disappointingly, it’s actually Keoghan who comes a bit unstuck. He’s no stranger to playing deviant menace but, rather muffled behind a shaky Merseyside accent, doesn’t quite convince as a broken-bird-turned-psychopath. Part of that is that Oliver’s transition from being, essentially, Felix’s new toy to a new power player in the Saltburn mansion happens too suddenly – an oddly abrupt pacing decision, given how much the final act later drags. Saltburn keeps looking like it’s about to end but then never quite does, and though an absolute barnstormer of a closing scene does make the wait worth it, you do feel the minutes tick on by as the plot wraps up all its loose ends.
What never falters is just how pretty everything looks. Linus Sandgren’s camerawork captures the luxuriously gorgeous interiors and hazy summer days with beauty and crispness – it helps that the Saltburn estate is actually a single real house and gardens, allowing for long tracking shots that let you get intimately familiar with the place’s geography. A tight aspect ratio hammers home the oppressive claustrophobia of the Cattons’ lifestyle without undercutting the grandiosity – there’s a richness to every frame that is just lovely to look at, even as the characters get up to some increasingly gross stuff.
An eminently hummable soundtrack of early 21st Century bangers completes the atmosphere, from MGMT’s ‘Time to Pretend’ to a very brief but still funny use of ‘Mr Brightside’ to an instantly iconic deployment of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’. It all adds up to a very pretty façade, one that is covering up some glaring foundational flaws, but doing so in such a stylish way that you almost don’t mind. In this way, as much as Saltburn might find its own characters detestable, it can’t help but resemble them, falling short in its human soul, but never failing to look the part.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 