“Much like Fennell’s debut, Saltburn left the general opinion in disagreement – is it genius or is it just lazy provocation?”

Saltburn is Emerald Fennell’s second feature film, a psychological thriller telling Oliver Quick’s grotesque and disturbing summer at Felix Catton’s family estate, the castle of Saltburn. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August of this year, before being released to expectant audiences in November for its interesting cast including rising stars Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, alongside Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, and Archie Madekwe. Carey Mulligan, who had starred in Fennell’s first feature Promising Young Woman (2020), also makes an appearance in the first half, and much like Fennell’s debut, Saltburn left the general opinion in disagreement – is it genius or is it just lazy provocation?

Saltburn charts the story of Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), freshly arrived at Oxford in 2006. We get that Oliver is new, strange and awkward (but not as awkward as that one guy, Michael Gavey). He looks small in his neatly ironed jacket, makes himself seem dependable, overly grateful and considerate as he becomes friends with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the beloved young aristocrat. Felix cannot help but feel a privileged sort of empathy for poor helpless Oliver, and his tragic story of mentally ill parents fallen into substance abuse.

The movie starts with a close-up shot of Oliver’s face, lighting a cigarette, now older and more confident, asserting ‘I wasn’t in love with him’ and is followed by kaleidoscope scenes of memories. The opening monologue then ends with the question ‘Was I in love with him?’, reversing the initial statement and very obviously suggesting that the two hours to follow will reveal the answer. And indeed, the first act successfully presents an apparently innocent crush slowly descending into a twisted obsession that finds Oliver standing outside Felix’s window in the middle of the night. But voyeurism is only the first of many unexpected steps. When Oliver’s dad passes away, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his family’s estate, Saltburn, which becomes the playground of the family’s downfall, at the hands of Oliver himself.

From the beginning of the movie up to Oliver’s introduction to the Catton family, the atmosphere is engaging, with its 2000s perfection of music and clothing right  down to Felix’s eyebrow piercing. But as soon as you start getting used to it, everything is uprooted and transposed to the estate of Saltburn, culminating with  grotesque. Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike do an incredible job at portraying the absurdity of their privilege, painting characters as clueless as they are superficial, and who absolutely love to pity the ‘utterly, utterly tragic.’ Pike especially made the most of every single one of her lines as Elspeth Catton, being so out of touch with reality that it brings an other-wordly and quite unexpected sort of humour to the situation, especially through her mock-sympathy for poor dear Pamela (Carey Mulligan).

“What disappointed me is that you’re led to expect something greater, a grander scheme in the background that you won’t really notice until the end but when it is put in front of you, it appears as both too much and not enough since you’ve lost the main character in the process.”

Oliver is out of place, unused to upper-class manners, and is seen at his most real when he exhales ‘Fucking hell’ after his first introduction to the family. Felix stands on the other end of the spectrum with his ‘It’s just black tie’, sounding falsely disdainful of a class pride he actually feels more than comfortable in. He lends Oliver some clothes, fuelling his transformation into this Felix-wannabe-wanna-have who’s chucked the glasses and dishevelled his hair. He’s still the humble and malleable kid around Felix, but progressively turns assertive and openly manipulative with anyone else, especially Felix’s sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver).

Finding his way around the family’s relations, Oliver interferes to twist it all in his favour. Like the statue in the middle of a hedge maze taken straight from Kubrick, Oliver is the Minotaur created as punishment for the rich. Contrary to the bull-headed beast, it’s hard to picture Oliver as a victim, and much easier to confine him to the role of executor planting his seeds of chaos in Saltburn without anything in mind other than discord. When he realises how easy it is to web conflict within the family, any sense of shame is lost along the way to present each of the characters with the version of him they want to see. He will stop at nothing – except maybe runny eggs.

In an interview with Ella Kemp for Letterboxd, as she refers to Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), Fennell states that, ‘sex isn’t between people, it’s actually between beauty and disgust. There has to be some element that is transgressive, slightly frightening.’ Undeniably, there are frightful elements in the hauntingly massive form of Saltburn, in Farleigh’s (Archie Madekwe) menacing arrogance, in Venetia’s decaying mind, but I feel that a lot of it was lost in the final attempt to portray Oliver as calculating and completely deprived of empathy. While they turn out successfully hilarious and comedic in their excess, those scenes qualified as provocative, and specifically the bathtub incident and grave canoodling, reveal how Oliver is driven crazy by his obsession for what he can’t have, while the period oral sex follows a completely different intention. The intensity of the first two is denied by the final sequence displaying Oliver as the orchestrator of the events, and makes it trickier to reconcile the different sides of the character.

The movie starts off being about Oliver’s fascination and subsequent obsessive love for Felix – or if it wasn’t love, like Oliver seems to believe at the end, it was something even stronger that had him slurping bathtub drains and humping graves. Oliver wants so desperately that he constantly does whatever is needed to keep Felix interested in him, trying his hardest to ward off Michael’s ominous prediction, ‘He’ll get bored of you.’

But it turns out that Oliver is maybe too good at keeping Felix interested, so much so that upon intercepting a call from Oliver’s mother, Felix decides to drive them to the Quick household on Oliver’s birthday, on a road-trip that has them joyfully singing along to ‘Mr Brightside’ until Oliver realises their destination. As Felix finds out that the Quicks are actually a well-balanced middle-class family with a father that is very much alive, his reaction perfectly paraphrases that of his parents’ after his death. A forced smile tugs at his face in a terrifying grimace, playing clueless.

The tension climaxes during Oliver’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream themed birthday party on that same day, in one final show of grandeur before it all collapses with Felix’s death. Oliver’s costume as Puck, both court jester and witty enough to orchestrate the whole comedy with his mistakes and magical pranks, reiterates the imagery presenting Oliver as a split character who might just go with the flow, or actually behind the reins of the whole operation.

“Emerald Fennell fails in presenting a coherent middle-class character trying to take over the rich and in the same motion almost portrays the Cattons as harmless, which they most certainly aren’t. In choosing to introduce himself as working-class and casting out his loving and well-balanced middle-class family, Oliver becomes a classless entity –  certainly not a saint, perhaps a villain, or some sort of vigilante.”

Feeling betrayed and played, Felix orders Oliver to leave the estate after the party. He dies that same night, at the feet of the Minotaur statue, after a conversation full of contempt on his side, but brimming with homoerotic despair on Oliver’s – à la The Talented Mr Ripley (Minghella, 1999). Realising that he can’t have Felix, Oliver makes sure that no one else ever will. And though it could have been, Felix’s death doesn’t feel like the turning point that would throw Oliver over the edge. 

In that same Letterboxd interview, Fennell adds that Saltburn is ‘more about my obsession and all of our obsessions with looking at things we want. The constant watching and endless voyeurism, the bottomless pit of voracious need and desire for people and their houses and their families.’ And this is true, but after Felix’s death, Oliver doesn’t just take his place – he chooses to end the whole family. Is it all done out of contempt then? Or just because he can so he might as well? That ‘voracious need’ Fennell talks about has lost its vigour, and Felix’s death isn’t the catalyst it would have been for first-act-Oliver.

During Oliver’s first breakfast at Saltburn, when talking about Percy Shelley’s doppelganger who stalked him prior to his death, one can see Felix in his pink shirt walking in the courtyard past the window, though he’s also sat in the room with everyone else – hinting at the fact that Felix’s days are numbered. Later on, after his death, the butler Duncan is ordered to close the curtains of the same room, tainting it a bloody red, so that the family (plus Oliver) doesn’t see Felix’s body being wheeled past the window. Sir James is authoritatively intent on everyone finishing their lunch, and Elspeth retreats into their tradition of pretence and faked courtoisie as they are unable to deal with the death of their son, the one thing their status has no power to alter.

Despite how on-the-nose the symbolism might be at times, some of the foreshadowing and imagery can be appreciated, as well as the colour-schemes and framing. But the film as a whole tends to rely too strongly on impressive cinematography. Sure, some will argue that the entire storyline revolves around the idea of putting style before substance, and that all that matters to the main character in the end is material. Aesthetics are one thing, but they can’t hold a movie up by themselves. I find it hard to believe that Oliver’s progressive lack of substance is a way to prove a point or support his storyline. Moreover, I can’t bring myself to believe that Oliver was orchestrating the overtaking of the whole family and estate from the beginning. It just doesn’t compute.

The sequence of back-to-back flashbacks to show how Oliver planned out meeting Felix, becoming his friend and so on, should feel like a twist, but it doesn’t. Or at least there wasn’t much shock in it for me. Why take the audience’s hand and point out everything for us? But even then, if it had stopped at the nail in the bike tire, would it have held up the end of the story as Oliver methodically gets rid of Venetia, and the parents, until he inherits the whole estate? What disappointed me is that you’re led to expect something greater, a grander scheme in the background that you won’t really notice until the end but when it is put in front of you, it appears as both too much and not enough since you’ve lost the main character in the process.

A lot of the backlash faced by the movie after its release in theatres was also due to the fact that, once again, the first act leads you to expect an interesting take on privilege in those high-end colleges but in the end leaves you with not much to chew on… aside from ‘Eat the rich!’ (private bits not excluded). Emerald Fennell fails in presenting a coherent middle-class character trying to take over the rich and in the same motion almost portrays the Cattons as harmless, which they most certainly aren’t. In choosing to introduce himself as working-class and casting out his loving and well-balanced middle-class family, Oliver becomes a classless entity –  certainly not a saint, perhaps a villain, or some sort of vigilante. And ‘vigilante’ doesn’t even really cover it. Oliver’s intentions in the end are more unclear than they were at the beginning. Which perhaps is the aim, but to me it came across as falsely disturbing and lacking in substance more than anything.

Barry Keoghan’s performance undeniably stands out as the highlight of the movie. Although I think that his full potential is still waiting for its spotlight, he did an incredible job with what was given to him for a first leading role of this calibre, after years of seeing him shine on the sides in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos, 2017) or, more recently, The Banshees of Inisherin (McDonagh, 2022). His features are striking enough to make his character stand out from the slender and polished aristocrats. Like the entire family, Venetia is fascinated precisely by this – ‘You’re so… real’. Even if it feels like a thread has been lost, Keoghan keeps you interested by a mesmerising performance, though despite the movie’s ambitions his character doesn’t reach the level of a Patrick Bateman or Mr Ripley. Strong support is offered by both Elordi and Pike in their own way – Pike as the excessively out-of-touch aristocrat, and Elordi as the balance between this other world and Oliver’s initial reality. The final sequence succeeds in reiterating that the whole thing is a comedy and satire before anything else, putting Keoghan at the centre again with his surprisingly graceful moves, dancing along to the iconic Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s, ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ in one last show of contempt and disdain for the puppets he mastered one by one.

WORDS: Nina Bernier