“You might know me from Saltburn, not from seeing the film, just from seeing the TikToks,” heartthrob Jacob Elordi said during a Saturday Night Live monologue over the weekend. “If you saw the movie with your parents,” he adds, “I’m sorry.”
Saltburn is perhaps 2023’s buzziest film, recently garnering acclaim at the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and the Golden Globes and inspiring countless TikToks gleefully capitalizing on Generation Z’s favorite sordid thriller.
If you haven’t seen the film or the TikToks, let me catch you up. Barry Keoghan, of The Banshees of Inisherin fame, stars as Oliver Quick, an Oxford college student who lacks the wealth and prestige of his peers. He befriends and is befriended by Felix Catton (Euphoria’s Elordi), snagging an invite to spend the summer at the hunk’s family estate, Saltburn. There, Oliver’s and the Catton family’s fates intertwine in a story about social class, lust, and obsession.
It sounds pretty dramatic when you put it that way, but the film is rather more boring than it hopes to be. (You can read Kara Kennedy’s excellent summary for the Washington Examiner magazine here.) I’ll go ahead and spoil it because, to be honest, this is not a film I’d recommend that anyone add to their to-watch list. And the fact is, if you’ve seen the trending TikToks, you’ve seen more than enough.
The film’s premise is analogous to that of the 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley (itself based on a 1955 novel). Saltburn’s director minimizes the connection, saying that her version was meant to be very “British,” focusing on a world in which “class and power and sex all kind of, yeah, collide in one sort of specific place.”
Let’s start with Ripley. In the turn-of-the-century film, Matt Damon stars as Tom Ripley, a young man who, after telling one lie about his resume to snag a job, finds himself in a web of falsehoods as he travels to Europe at a father’s behest to convince his son to return to the states. Tom admires the son, Dickie Greenleaf (played by Jude Law), becoming so obsessed with Dickie — staying at Dickie’s Italian villa, wearing his clothes, and suggesting that they take a bath together — that it’s unclear if he wants to make love to him or become the man himself.
When an altercation leads to Tom killing Dickie, he does take on the latter’s identity, attempting to live a double life as both men while fooling everyone in Dickie’s social milieu. This leads to more lies, and more murders, until you begin to think Tom might be done with it all. Dickie’s suspicious ex-girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow) has been told she’s being hysterical for suspecting foul play, and Tom has even met another man, sensitive musician Peter Smith-Kingsley (Jack Davenport).
In the film’s final moments, Tom and Peter are taking off together on a ship. Tom confesses to Peter, “I always thought it’d be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,” to which Peter responds, “What are you talking about? You’re not a nobody. That’s the last thing you are.”
But this achingly pure expression of love doesn’t matter, and we know it. The ship’s passengers include a woman who thinks Tom is Dickie, whom Peter knows to be dead. In short, Tom has to kill Peter, the only one who has ever been willing to love Tom with no pretenses. In the film’s final shot, we see Tom sitting alone in his cabin, surrounded by mirrors. Unless he continues to kill and kill and kill, the only one who will see him fully is himself.
It’s a fittingly dark conclusion, one suitable for Edgar Allan Poe. You can almost hear the heart beating beneath the floorboards. Not so the ending of Saltburn.
When Oliver stays with the Catton family, he plays each member against the other, conniving to become invaluable and irreplaceable. We later learn that he did not grow up poor to alcoholic parents, as he had told Felix; his parents are respectable, middle-class folks. But they are boring. Unlike Tom’s offhanded lie, Oliver’s whole story is orchestrated intentionally from the beginning. He chooses Felix as a target, causing him to get a flat tire before class, offering his own bike instead, and thus jump-starting their friendship.
Once at the family’s estate, Oliver’s obsession infamously takes the form of one unsavory bathtub scene and one unsavory graveyard scene, among others. Of course, after Felix learns the truth about Oliver’s past, he must be killed. Same for the sister, and later the mother, as Oliver finesses his fate such that he inherits the entire Saltburn estate. Rather than facing himself in a dark room, however, Oliver spends Saltburn’s final moments in a painfully long performance as he dances, naked, through the empty estate, having triumphed over those snobby aristocrats.
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Or has he? The problem with Saltburn is not so much the gratuitous ick factor as it is that there is no raison d’être. You spend two hours watching a middle-class sociopath manipulate a bunch of snobs until he kills half of them and steals all of their money. There is no one to root for and nothing much to linger in your mind after you finish the movie (except for, of course, those scenes).
If you’re looking for a similarly styled psychological thriller, go watch (or read) The Talented Mr. Ripley. The problem with Saltburn is that it would greatly disappoint Poe. Unlike Ripley’s tale, it has no tell-tale heart.