Pointless poses as poignant in Saltburn
Kara Kennedy
I was writer-director Emerald Fennell’s target audience for Saltburn: a British Gen Zer that takes great pleasure in sneering at upper-class Oxford types and loves anything vacuous. I expected that it would be like a posh Skins, with bratty toffs spraying Dom Perignon into each other’s mouths instead of a six-pack of the cheapest beer. I was told by even my most stylish of friends that it was like TikTok-ified Brideshead Revisited, or The Talented Mr. Ripley with a bit of softcore pornography. They are friends no longer, dropped for having such bad opinions, now that I’ve had a few days to mull over the single worst film I have ever watched.
The film, Fennell’s second after 2020’s grad school thesis of a film Promising Young Woman, opens with Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) joining the class of 2006 at Oxford University. Quite impressively for the mid-aughts, the setting marked by background music (Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, etc.) manages to evoke little to no nostalgia at all. The few attempts at taking us back 20 years were off target. Slapping a physically repulsive eyebrow piercing on Felix Catton (an Adonis-like Jacob Elordi), the posh aristo who doesn’t really care about anything, doesn’t make him less of a cliche but more of one. Oliver sports a pair of rectangular wire rimmed glasses in that mid-aughts shape that didn’t look good on anyone. Oxford is presented as a dumping ground for the cripplingly spectrummy and the obnoxiously rich, which, as much as you may want to be true, isn’t.
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Emerald Fennell clearly hates the pomposity of the Oxbridge set and the Brideshead mythos it trades on, anyway. Her class-based attack aimed to show the rich up almost feels genuine, until you realize that she herself was at Oxford at the time, presumably paid for by her parents, a famous jewelry designer and author. Darling, the only thing worse than the obnoxious rich are the self-hating ones.
In act one, we see Oliver, a wincing loser, befriend Felix and his louche, lordly clique by playing on his sympathies. After the semester ends, Felix invites the poverty-stricken Oliver to his extravagant country pile, Saltburn. Here we meet the only fully fleshed out characters in the entire movie. Rosamund Pike plays the lady of the house, Elspeth, the neurotic housewife without a good word to say about anyone, and Richard E. Grant plays Felix’s eccentric father, James, who does such a convincing job at playing the slightly odd, stinking rich septuagenarian that I feel like I’ve met him 10 times before. Carey Mulligan plays Pamela, a stylish but troubled friend of the family, who is the most interesting of the lot and foolishly relegated to about three minutes of screen time.
In a twist that comes at the end of Oliver’s summer at Saltburn, you’re meant to be shocked to learn that he isn’t poor at all, but rather something even more mundane than poor: middle class. He carefully crafted a story of drug-addled parents to be pitied and taken care of by Felix. This startles but doesn’t surprise you, because you didn’t really think about what could happen. Fennell obviously wants to shock, but you can’t shock people if they don’t care about your characters because they’re so vapid.
Each of the film’s 131 minutes is unremarkable and uninspired, and they are strung together messily. Which would be forgivable if it wasn’t also so often physically cringe-inducing. In the online commentary where consensus is formed, members of Gen Z are quick to address this by saying that it’s messy in a fun, cute way. A hot mess. It’s on purpose because we don’t really care, duh! Vulture called it “a mess but an entertaining mess,” with the reviewer adding, “I had so much fun just waiting to see how icky this movie was going to make me feel next,” in reference to a scene where the protagonist, Oliver, slurps semen out of a rusty drain for reasons still unclear to me.
Saltburn apologists will say that the scene was imperative in showing that Quick had an all-consuming lustful obsession with the ejaculator, Felix. I’d say that it isn’t clever or artistic or essential for character development, but instead crude for the sake of crudeness. And after this review, I will never utter a word about it again, because that’s all attention seeker Emerald Fennell wants.
Upon establishing the setting at Saltburn and establishing the gross and creepy hidden lust of the main character for his supporting star, there’s an hour of vibes, a Pinterest mood board made up of clippings from Euphoria and a 16-year-old’s Tumblr account from 2009. We learn that Felix’s posh sister is bulimic when her mother admits that she’s partial to “fingers for pudding.” The kids play tennis in black-tie to MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” and everyone does a bit of cocaine at a party. Then, in the last third of the film they all start dying off. Felix dies off first, then his sister, then his father, then his mother. Oliver becomes the sole heir of Saltburn, and shows us how happy he is by spinning around his flaccid penis as he dances around his new abode. But not before Emerald Fennell subjects us to him sticking it into the dirt covering Felix’s grave, just because.
After two hours of watching, and some nightmares afterward, I’m still not really sure what Fennell was getting at with Saltburn. Should we eat the rich or be the rich? Don’t invite strangers with sexual perversions into your home? I don’t mind a movie with no message, but Fennell makes it abundantly clear in a very desperate way that she wants to be seen as delivering some sort of poignant social critique. The trouble is, her camera, like her main character, can’t decide if the rich turn her stomach or turn her on.
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Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in the Spectator, the New Statesman, Tatler, the Daily Telegraph, and others.