Review: Saltburn

Director:  Emerald Fennell

Stars:  Jacob Elordi, Barry Keoghan, Archie Madekwe

Going to see seemingly illustrious or high concept quasi-art house movies at a multiplex with a wild public audience is always a bit of a crap shoot. So it turned out to be at my local Vue Cinema with Saltburn; a packed screening (in admittedly one of the venues smaller rooms), almost entirely inhabited by a thirsty teenage female contingent there for one Jacob Elordi. By the second hour someone was snoring loudly. In front of me, most of the row amused themselves by balancing their drinks on their heads, or sticking their legs in the air, partway obscuring the screen. And while I’m a stickler for cinema etiquette in most cases, all I could do was feel jealous of everyone having a better time than I was, because I was fool enough to still be paying attention.

You can hardly blame them. Emerald Fennell’s second effort as writer/director has been heavily promoted as a kind of endless party film; a mid ’00s remix of Brideshead Revisited and Millennial nostalgia with dark undercurrents of sinister, even cultish behaviour going on around the labyrinthine grounds of the titular country estate. Throw in the young and the beautiful (Elordi) and you’ve got something that seems exceedingly attractive from a distance. Up close, its been dramatically mis sold; an excruciatingly tedious slog through rote material that’s been paced abysmally, pocked with one or two desperate attempts at provocation and infested with some of the worst dialogue of the year. Saltburn has the gall to go on like this for 125 minutes that feel twice that, before cruelly revealing it could have been a lot more fun all along.

Oliver (Barry Keoghan) tells us his story, beginning with his arrival at Oxford and the feelings of exclusion associated with his lowly middle class status. Dreamy rich boy Felix (Elordi) becomes his obscure object of desire, and a chance opportunity to help the lad secures an otherwise unlikely, adoptive bond between them. When term ends – and having told horror stories about addiction and poverty awaiting him back at home – Oliver is invited by Felix to Saltburn; a sprawling estate that reveals the extent of Felix’s wealth and privilege.

Elordi is enjoyably sweet and basic as Felix – a taciturn but mainly guileless himbo – so Fennell’s clanging dialogue doesn’t immediately register as a problem here. It’s when the film beds down at Saltburn with her modest array of quirky rich folk that things start speedily unravelling. Rosamund Pike seems to get the plummy caricature she’s been handed as matriarch Elspeth, and tries to wrestle something respectable out of it. The same can’t be said of Richard E. Grant, lumbered with nothing but howlers as Sir James Catton, a man written with the nuance of a Harry Enfield sketch. Most bemusing is the oft-dependable Keoghan, who can’t land the Liverpudlian accent asked of him, so frequently just skips it. Oliver is meant to be a slippery, untrustworthy narrator, but the edge Keoghan can bring to such roles (see The Killing of a Sacred Deer) has been deliberately subdued by Fennell, leaving us a frustrating weasel difficult to root for.

And so Saltburn dawdles, cooling its heels as Fennell tries on the shimmer of Sofia Coppola’s poetic dalliances with the idle rich. She doesn’t accomplish it. Instead we feel tested by the trivialities of her long, hot summer, forced to cringe through some of the most awkward sex scenes committed to film in recent memory. Oliver licking the sperm from the bottom of Felix’s bathtub feels like an ungainly poke in the ribs for some sort of reaction, while its heavy metaphor clangs like a gong. There’s a later scene involving a fresh grave that is somehow even worse. Nothing is ordinary in Fennell’s desperate attempt to be interesting, but the result is cluttered yet endless.

The ending is fun. Fennell belatedly finds some pace as she pulls a rug we haven’t stepped on. But if Saltburn is to be taken as a bawdy Eat the Rich escapade, it feels as though Fennell doesn’t fully understand the concept. Her aspirational endpoint is too institutionalised and conservative, and she may inadvertently have told on herself. And yet it is only here that her big swings start working, including her sprawling final shot in which Keoghan literally gives his all. Clumsy as it may be, where was this spirit for the past two hours?

Many of the film’s affectations speak to its creator’s intentions. The arbitrary use of 1.33:1 aspect ratio seems to only service her desire to be taken seriously, perhaps most keenly echoing Andrea Arnold’s American Honey. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is frequently gorgeous and he was perhaps hired for his work capturing the excesses of Babylon. And I’d be lying if I said her soundtrack didn’t take me back (the euphoric hit of MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” works wonders in a well-engineered montage). But the overall feeling on exiting the film is of time wasted. Saltburn is an empty and embarrassing picture. In spite of its lofty literary aspirations (Patricia Highsmith, Evelyn Waugh), it’s key text appears most commonly to be the front cover of Oasis’ Be Here Now.