A much talked-about movie, critics have tried to comment seriously on Saltburn while social media has delighted in using it as fodder for memes. Mostly its shock factor is so over-the-top that it has drawn ridicule from plebian audiences whereas its ultimately empty narrative has left the highbrow cinephiles disappointed.
From the get go, Saltburn recalls a number of hackneyed tropes used in cinema. Firstly, Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), the protagonist, is an introvert and oddball freshman who arrives at Oxford University where he doesn’t fit in. It’s a world where the elite party together more than they study and it’s all just out of reach for poor Ollie who has “zero chat” and “no one wants to sit next to because he buys his clothes from Oxfam”. Only a token geek who resents being an outcast assumes the two should stick together but Oliver ditches him the first chance he gets to have a round of beer with the cool kids.
Secondly, there is the immediate introduction to the object of the protagonist’s affection, a golden boy and big-man-on-campus Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) who Oliver declares he was not in love with but did love. You know where this is going.
The invisible nerd is taken under the wing of the devil-may-care Felix who has the indiscreet magnanimity of one born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Oliver says he has no family; his father is dead and his mother a druggie. There’s nobody to go home to for the summer hols. Oliver’s life is so alien to Felix that it piques his curiosity about the boy who has naught and invokes his pity for him. Felix has a thing for strays and habitually invites the likes of Ollie over to his palatial residence, the estate of Saltburn.
Again, you know where this headed: we will now see how a poor boy whom nobody loves fares in the world of the wealthy who have little to no depth of emotion because their veins run blue blood.
Something starts to feel slightly off about Ollie’s fixation on Felix even before he sets foot in Saltburn. Of course, he won’t profess his lust for him, he has seen Felix only with (many) girls. He looks up to the young charmer who gets anything and anyone he wants, and more. But harmless and defenseless Ollie also keeps a lookout for Felix in a stalkerish way on campus, to the point of becoming a Peeping Tom. Does he want more than just to be with Felix? Does he want to, perhaps, become him? At Saltburn, Oliver gets a room interconnected to Felix’s with a shared bathroom, so he is really in his personal space with lots of opportunity to ogle at him.
There are more aristocrats for Oliver to study at the mansion with spiral staircases and Rubens on the walls, antique bowls and gardens complete with a maze. Felix’s parents (Richard E Grant and Rosamand Pike) are eccentric high-strung jabbering patsies with as much depth as puppets. The two actors are also wasted in these lazily written roles. Their superficiality is on the nose and Pike especially comes off unconvincing as an empty-headed socialite. I think the direction fails the portrayal of these two characters as much as the writing. Then there is Felix’s poorer American cousin Farleigh, who is a torment for Oliver in Oxford and Saltburn. He acts as a gratingly persistent and hammering reminder to Oliver that he will never fit into this world. It seems that nothing can get to Farleigh’s scornful arrogance, but ultimately Oliver puts him in his place. Venetia is Felix’s off-limits sister who lounges about the gardens at night and in the darkened manor hallways as a veritable seduction trap. Once the Mr Hyde in Oliver is grown enough to come out to prowl in the dark, he feasts on Venetia grotesquely.
The film gives eat-the-rich vibes of Talented Mr Ripley and Brideshead Revisited, but also the creepy and gory vibes of Get Out and - this is a bit of a spoiler - American Psycho, to name only a few. If a movie in its first act can remind you of so many other (better) films then ingenuity of script and direction is already out the window. Some kind reviewers for international publications have attributed the film to be “divisive” or “provocative”. One renowned film critic even calls it “diabolically clever” although he admits he felt cheated by director and writer Emerald Fennell in the end.
Saltburn does make moot the issue about provocative, avant-garde and modern cinema. Are audiences entertained by two hours of style over substance? Do scenes of lurid carnality offer insight into the depraved mind of a serial killer? Or are they employed as just a device to set apart a film with no original plot and distract from its plot holes? Meme creators, at least, have taken at face value Fennell’s tactic of using overlasciviousness throughout the film and shared squeals and shock on the internet. Oliver’s exhibitionist acts of sexual depravation have become synonymous to the shower scene from Psycho rendered as a joke in contemporary pop culture.
In the second part of the film, the change from diffident Oliver to manipulative mastermind comes without warning. Suddenly, he is trying to get inside the minds of the Catton women and make them putty in his hands by picking up whatever details the family offers about each other unawares. The vacuous Catton family is incapable of showing sincerity or warmth to Oliver, so caught up are they in their self-centred lives, but Oliver sidles into their everyday life and family time and creates space for himself.
The Cattons throw a large party for his birthday where everyone sings for him enthusiastically but nobody can recall his name. At his birthday party, Oliver is dressed with horns on his head like the Minotaur statue in the centre of the estate’s labyrinth, linking the beastly nature of the two. The half-bull-half-man creature sort of oversees the dramatic event that unfolds at his feet in the film’s climax. Felix wears tender golden angel wings signifying innocence and ephemeral youth. The climactic scene between both him and Oliver also shows Felix at his heart is sincere in the face of Oliver’s dark and devious nature, he remains non-threatening.
The denouement that follows is apathetic in its execution and tries to prop up the film with more rudely dilatory and unnecessarily obscene scenes like the now famous grave defilement one. Filmmaker Fennell in an interview said, “I like the audience to be complicit” and we are made unwilling voyeurs of the behaviour of a disturbed mind. The audiences are made to watch in horror whether they cover their eyes and peek through their fingers, or in a mind-numbed state of disgust.
You might have an urge to take a bath after watching the whole psychopathic triumph/ fiasco. It is a cauldron of dirt and graveyard grime, menstrual blood, sweat, spunk and coke. So the visual impact is regrettably lasting.
Although the primary location of the film, Drayton House in Northampshire, offers stunning scenery and lush views of natural beauty and heritage architecture, it too feels like a forced element. Too many TV series, from Emily in Paris to Downton Abbey and even more movies, for example, use such settings to capture audiences; showing the Saltburn manor as an imposing and larger than life character adds nothing new to the pleasure of movie watching and is yet another stale trope. Perhaps the success of the film is that it suits our time well: it offers nothing original or pleasurable as a work of art but has nevertheless managed to create so much discussion about foolery.