Saltburn: Doing the Dirty Work a Fine Young Man Needs to Do

Academy Award winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) brings us a beautifully wicked tale of privilege and desire. Struggling to find his place at Oxford University, student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites him to Saltburn, his eccentric family’s sprawling estate, for a summer never to be forgotten.

Review:

“Saltburn” is the sort of fakery I’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. The movies too desperate to please and offend, to deliberately confuse, too pleased with itself and petty shocks to rile any genuine excitement from me.

This thing was written and directed by Emerald Fennell, whose previous movie was “Promising Young Woman,” a horror flick about rape that was also a revenge comedy. Fennell’s seen the erotic thrillers, studied her Hitchcock and possibly read her Patricia Highsmith, and gets that if you name your main character Oliver Quick he’s obligated to do something at least arguably Dickensian. It’s all for little bother.

The friendship between bookish Oliver (Barry Keoghan) and rakish Felix (Jacob Elordi) is imbalanced, an obsessive friendships that one of them mistakes for love and the other tolerates because he’s needier than he looks. The action is split between Oxford College in England and Felix’s family sprawling estate, Saltburn.

The best scenes in the movie happen during the Oxford stretch when Oliver experiences Felix as an intoxicant, and Felix’s prepster coterie experiences Oliver as an irritant. There’s some crackle and dreaminess and post-adolescent instability here. Identities are being forged.

The movie eventually splits into three different films. Lust and envy take over. As does Fennell’s tedious stab at psychopathology. Felix hails from one of those stiff, pathologically upper class clans where “button up ” is as an emotion. Everybody at Saltburn seems ready for a new toy. And Oliver’s A-student impulses make a sport of ingratiation and eventual emotional and mental manipulation of the others. His erudition, availability and blue eyes impress Felix’s droll mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike); his mere arrival arouses Felix’s self-conscious zombie of a sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver).

Fennell is more drawn to styling and stunts than emotional trenchancy. When the time comes for the movie to make its switch to gothic mischief, it’s like watching the first half of “Psycho” turn into the video for “When Doves Cry” “Saltburn” has the same seductive sleekness as “Promising Young Woman”some of the nerve, but none of the dread or poison kick.

Fennell has made a movie about toxic elitism. Most of the class indictment is outsourced to the soundtrack. Staging the warfare between the two strivers doesn’t go far enough. Saltburn luxuriates in what it’s pretending to blow up.

Barry Keoghan is left to create a role out of the disparate parts of other ones (Norman Bates, Tom Ripley, Patrick Bateman), yet doesn’t get all the way there. Saltburn asks a lot of Keoghan, who could have built a memorable, original character for Fennell, but real acting is not what Fennell’s after here. Saltburn exists for its coda, just for the cringe.