(4 / 5)
Having thoroughly skewered the male-female power dynamic in Promising Young Woman, in Saltburn Emerald Fennell turns her withering eye on another social structure: the British class system.
Newly arrived at Oxford University, scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), bright, studious, and dressed like Harry Potter newly arrived at Hogwarts – all house scarf and specs – struggles to fit in amid the bright young things.
That is till a brief encounter ingratiates him to a privileged Adonis, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), setting them on the path to an unlikely, if unequal, friendship. Invited to spend the summer at Felix’s ancestral manse, Saltburn, Oliver finds himself immersed in the privileged environs of an Evelyn Waugh novel. 1
The beauty of Waugh’s malice, so-called, finds worthy continuity in Fennell’s sharp, multi-faceted depiction of the borderline caricature permanent residents: keen, gossipy mater, Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike); enthustiastic, lightly eccentric pater, Sir James (Richard E. Grant); suggestive sister Venetia (Alison Oliver); and the coolly cruel cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), who resents Oliver’s presence.
Welcomed as part of the Catton’s succession of houseguests2 – to whom they magnanimously provide sympathy and hospitality before growing bored and blithely disposing of – Oliver begins subtly playing into the toxic power dynamic.
Part dark social satire, part twisted Highsmithian thriller, every scene is exquisitely conceived with more than a few guaranteed to have the audience squirming with excruciating awkwardness or kinky eroticism.
Both brutal and puckish in appearance, as Oliver, Keoghan is as deeply unsettling as in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Intense and yet gentle, vulnerable and inscrutable, it’s a tremendous contradiction of a performance, and one that finds a perfect counterpoint in Oliver’s object of desire/obsession: Elordi’s uncomplicated Felix – sincere yet condescending, well-meaning but entitled, the light to Oliver’s dark.
DoP Linus Sandgren’s cinematography captures the same dichotomy between the summer’s day, as in a gloriously saturated bed of flowers, and the richly gothic night, a cigarette butt glowing in the darkness; all captured in a boxy 1:33:1 aspect ratio. Anthony Willis’ moody electronic score is supplemented by a host of early-2000s bangers, encapsulating the sense of a place frozen between the distant past and recent present.
But all good things must come to an end, and if Fennell’s script ultimately favours an all-too literal payoff, then Saltburn is never anything less than sharply realised and deliriously entertaining.
- Who, Felix informs him, based several characters on Cattons’ past.
- Including a memorable supporting role for a previous Fennell collaborator.
