Struggling to find his place at Oxford University, student Oliver Quick finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton, who invites him to Saltburn, his eccentric...
WHAT I LIKED: Emerald Fennell's 'Saltburn,' is mostly a fascinating class commentary about a boy called Oliver (Barry Keoghan) struggling to fit in with a bunch of posh people.
It opens with his arrival at Oxford Uni where most students seem completely brash and at ease, but his background and resulting anxiety and inconfidence means Oliver has to put on an act just to be noticed. Then, even when he does find his way in, he's constantly treated like a leper by staff and students alike, and Jacob Elordi's Felix (the boy he becomes infatuated with) only seems to be interested in a friendship out of pity over his drug-addicted parents.
When that kinship blossoms though, he's offered to stay a summer at Felix's titular family mansion, and that presents an opportunity for the class divide to be amplified to an almost satirical degree. From the moment they meet Oliver the family treat him like a lost puppy to fawn - and in the case of his sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), drool - over. Plus they act like a different breed of human; doing next to nothing all day except gossiping about their various acquaintances, and - especially Richard E Grant and Rosamund Pike's hilarious parent characters - displaying unbelievable naivety about the real world ("I was a lesbian for a while, you know, but it was all a bit too wet for me in the end. Men are so lovely and dry"). The more time you spend with their entitlement, laziness and suppressed judgement and hatred, the more you start to loathe them and long for poor young Oliver to avenge them in some way.
-MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD-
That increasingly seems like a possibility too, as Fennell enjoys infusing her film with various horror tropes. Aside from Linus Sandgren's gothic, blood-red cinematography, we get a vast, creepy location, Venetia standing in the foggy nights under Oliver's window, and even an ominous butler (Paul Rhys) who says things like "everyone gets lost at Saltburn." But it's only after the shocking reveal about how Oliver's tragic upbringing was just another part of his act to fit in that the tension explodes and Oliver starts killing the Saltburn folk off one by one.
In the words of Oliver himself, "the prey becomes the predator," and when we learn that he's been planning his killing spree from the moment he met Felix, it only makes it clearer that his friendship with him and the family was only possible because of his lies. Even the other lower class friends staying at Saltburn are forced to pine and exaggerate their situations to win the family's pity. But the fact they're all disregarded in the end and the fact only Oliver comes out of top because he murders the lot of them makes a brilliantly cynical point about how someone like him will never be treated as an equal by the upper classes, and how upward mobility is ultimately impossible.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: The fact Olivier wants to have sex with literally everyone at Saltburn undermines the class motivations and actually makes you see him mostly as a crazed psycho by the end. That's a shame because the way he's painted as the prey against this predatory family is fascinating, but the constant descent into shocking pornography becomes pretty tiresome pretty quickly.
VERDICT: Emerald Fennell's 'Saltburn,' is mostly a fascinating class commentary about a working class boy whose only way to a place at the top is to murder an entire family.
