06/10/2023 - Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman is a scabrous thriller about the British upper classes, and those who wish to infiltrate them

Saltburn, the glossy new film by fast-rising British writer-director Emerald Fennell, screening at BFI London, has “remember whens” and “if onlys” on its mind: nostalgia for the prim and privileged Oxford education of her youth, with its sense of abundant possibility for the lucky few, and a fair bit of scorn for the establishment traditions of that environment, wondering if it would be best if it were torn down. With her aim on the right targets, and closely observed (if often broad) points to make, her Saltburn has enough pep, vim and style to carry it towards a tragic and bloody conclusion, yet its predictability and sometimes superficiality allow it to founder.

Beginning pointedly in autumn 2006, as a welcome flyer on a college gate announces, Saltburn initially raises hopes that it will strongly interrogate that era, with New Labour in the UK running on its final fumes and the industry-disrupting Great Recession two years around the corner. But more disappointingly, Fennell instead uses this time marker to recapture Oxford as she once experienced it, conjuring it as an aspirational and libidinous playland, with a summer at a college “chum’s” grand country estate awaiting those socially successful enough.

Oliver Quick (the impressive Barry Keoghan) is a quietly ambitious Literature student, wearing his learning and intellectual ability in an understated manner – more so than the Maths major who shouts out the answer to “275 times 83” at mealtimes – and burying a cunning and sociopathic streak. Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) is the dashing “aristo” of Oliver’s sexually ambiguous dreams, one of the sort of people who feel like they “own the place” at Oxford, after which they’re launched to attendant and ill-gotten professional success. Oliver wants him, and that, for himself, fuelled by an uneasy mix of romantic passion and a born interloper’s ambitious drive.

With Oliver unconvincingly claiming to be bereaved at the academic year’s end, Felix takes pity, inviting him to stay with his parents, Lord and Lady Catton (Richard E Grant and Rosamund Pike), at their palatial estate, at which point we can anticipate the plot trajectory from the moment the family butler creaks forward the ornate front door. Whilst Keoghan is charismatic and controlled in the role, Oliver is at once a vague cipher, and written at too high a pitch; rather than Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, an obvious inspiration for his character, he beds and murders each character with the dogged, step-by-step efficiency of the Terminator.

Can you make a classic British class satire, when what’s really presented is a heightened, MDMA-sustained version of that upper-crust realm, with the “new rave” youth soundtrack of that era dominating the sound mix? Fennell aims to impress us with luscious grandeur and spectacle, funded off the back of Promising Young Woman [+see also:
trailer
film profile]’s success and topicality. But whilst the atrocity exhibition diverts, with Pike’s character revelling in many sharp-tongued lines, there’s scant lasting flavour despite the abundance of salt.

Saltburn is a production by the USA and the UK, staged by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Media Rights Capital and LuckyChap Entertainment. World sales are by Amazon Studios.