Note: This review contains major spoilers for Saltburn.
For significant swaths of Emerald Fennell’s sophomore film Saltburn, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching an impeccably styled fragrance commercial. Filmed in a nostalgic 1.33 aspect ratio, the camera lingers on lush scenes of poreless, scantily clad twentysomethings lounging about a picturesque English estate. While there are traces of underlying poison laced throughout these sumptuous visuals, Saltburn is more invested in its own aesthetics than it is in its ostensible class satire. Unfortunately, it only cements Fennell’s mood board-esque, style-over-substance approach as a feature, rather than a bug, of her filmmaking — and that extends to its tantalizing but ultimately empty flirtations with queerness.
Unlike her debut feature Promising Young Woman, which marketed itself as a timely thriller for the “Me Too” era, Saltburn turns an eye to the past. We enter its opulent world through the eyes of working-class student Oliver “Ollie” Quick (Barry Keoghan, taking the eerie magnitude of his Killing of a Sacred Deer performance down a notch) who steps through the gilded gates of Oxford University in 2006. A working-class student already at a disadvantage thanks to the notorious, centuries-old class disparities in the U.K., this gangly outsider finds himself the odd man out amid a group of glossy one-percenters who have known each other since infancy. But we all know what kind of movie we’re in for: A chance meeting and a well-deployed sob story soon propel Ollie into the inner circle of class golden boy Felix Catton (Kissing Booth and Euphoria escapee Jacob Elordi), believability be damned.
At first, Felix’s ambiguous sexuality is one of the only exercises in subtlety in a film that otherwise seems allergic to subtext. Despite protesting, “I wasn’t in love with him” in Saltburn’s opening moments, Felix is nonetheless framed with such reverence that we as viewers are primed to analyze and question Ollie’s interest in him: Is it driven by pure lust, opportunism, or some mucky, late-stage capitalist meeting of the two? As Fennell herself noted in a recent interview with Pink News, “If you see your protagonist telling you… ‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ and then we see a thousand shots of the most beautiful man you’ve ever seen… you know you’re in for a ride.”
Ollie’s cathection of Felix grows slightly more complicated once he arrives at the eponymous Saltburn estate and begins setting his sights on two additional marks: Felix’s gay American-born cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a fellow Oxford student whose precarious standing as the only person of color in his posh friend group places him, in his mind, at odds with Ollie; and Felix’s bulimic sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), whose desire for someone “real” leaves her particularly vulnerable to Ollie’s seduction. The outsider even finds time to cozy up to Felix’s parents, played to farcical perfection by ensemble standouts Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike.
But although the film drenches itself in the visual language of repressed desire, Fennell doesn’t do much more than put it on display. In her interview with Pink News, the writer-director described the Saltburn universe as one where “everyone wants everyone,” which is a nice idea, but perhaps only that. It’s telling that, in that same conversation, Fennell classified the film’s supposed queerness not as a distinct point-of-view, but as a subset of a vague, prevailing atmosphere of lustfulness. “This is a film entirely about desire, and that desire takes every conceivable manifestation, and it’s so important. Yeah, of course, [queerness is] part of the very fabric of the film,” she said.
Saltburn certainly isn’t the first work to toy with the intersections of classism and sexuality. Apart from 20-year-old Abercrombie & Fitch marketing campaigns, the film shares significant DNA with the likes of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Brideshead Revisited, or even the second season of The White Lotus. But in contrast to those more memorable stories, Saltburn has nothing notable to say about any of the pressing cultural topics it brushes against, like the wealth inequality of an empire in decline, or the interpersonal harm it perpetuates. We already know that the one-percenters who make the world go ’round are often vapid and self-absorbed, so assured in their unearned place in society that they can easily be manipulated by someone like Ollie. Most of us know this because our lives revolve around figuratively picking the change out of rich people’s pockets to survive. We didn’t need a director who has been a member of that upper class since birth — someone who reportedly only had to “put the word out” to her social circles to find the estate used in the film — to come along and teach us common folk that her peers are narcissists.
It should be noted that Saltburn isn’t the first visually stunning but ultimately hollow entry on Fennell’s resumé. As the showrunner of Killing Eve’s second season, she largely reduced the subtle, homoerotic cat-and-mouse between Eve and Villanelle to signifiers of ravenous consumption, like a piece of hot-pink couture or a knife hidden within blood-red lipstick, sacrificing the show’s razor-sharp, darkly comedic focus on an altar built out of pretty trinkets. Likewise, her debut Promising Young Woman drew plenty of attention for its impressively realized, sickly, candy-colored visuals, but ultimately failed to deliver the searing commentary on rape culture it promised.
The same pattern plays out with Saltburn, which glides pleasingly across the eyes without ever sticking in the mind. Though Keoghan is endlessly watchable as a pansexual grifter, Fennell’s attempts at rendering naughty transgressions read more as cheap ploys to scandalize an increasingly puritanical moviegoing public for whom even Oppenheimer’s brief flashes of nudity were too racy. To be generous, I suppose that scenes of Ollie slurping bathwater mixed with Felix’s cum, or a scene of him eating out Venetia while she’s on her period, could read as incredibly literal depictions of our anti-hero attempting to consume the Catton family’s riches on a carnal level. Those moments veers close to amateur internet erotica, but they are at least a stab at thematizing the film’s sexuality. However, the less said about a later, painfully drawn-out scene of Ollie masturbating naked atop a grave, the better.
The only truly resonant queer moment comes when Ollie sneaks into Farleigh’s room after his frenemy embarrasses him during a Catton family dinner party. Climbing atop Farleigh, Ollie begins giving his classmate a hand job, slowly wheedling submission out of his classmate between moans. It’s a genuinely unnerving scene underscoring the fragile power dynamics between a poor white man and a gay Black man conditionally embedded within a white supremacist class system. They are wordlessly pitted against one another, and the tension erupts.
However, these glimmers of a better movie are stamped out entirely by Saltburn’s disastrous third act, which reveals that Ollie isn’t a tragedy-laden working-class lad after all. He’s actually a cartoonishly evil middle-class kid who has been spinning lies to worm his way into an upper-class existence. Only in a monarchy would this read as a clever plot twist.
By the final scene — which I thought was coming a full 30 minutes earlier — he has managed to kill off every last one of the Catton family and manipulate them into leaving him the estate. As the camera follows a naked, dancing Ollie, panning indulgently around the lavish halls, it’s hard not to feel like Saltburn is exalting the very life it promised to eviscerate. Somehow the tragedy of the film isn’t the fact that such empty, callous people wield so much power in the first place; it’s that some middle-class hanger-on could sneak in and snatch it all away. In the end, it feels like Fennell wanted to show us a very nice house. Too bad she couldn’t bring herself to burn it down.
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