In Parasite, wealthy Mr. Park has no higher praise for his hired help than someone who doesn’t “cross the line.” After watching Saltburn, another artfully composed class-conscious film with an Oscar pedigree, it struck me that all Barry Keoghan’s Oliver does in this movie is cross the line. This maximalist arthouse film is about shoving his face, crotch, and mouth across the line and seeing how you react. Maybe that’s why this movie has proven to be as divisive as it is beloved, some hailing it as wickedly funny and smart while others roast it for having more flair than substance.
When we first meet Oliver, played by Barry Keoghan, he’s an awkward young man struggling to fit in at Oxford. He becomes enamored with his handsome and wealthy classmate Felix, played by Jacob Elordi. Taking pity on Oliver, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his family’s estate, Saltburn. There, lust, longing, and deception make a relaxing summer spiral into a bad acid trip amidst the stuffy and peculiar backdrop of British old money.
Yes, Barry Keoghan plays yet another pitiful, freakishly unnerving man child character, his third since The Banshees of Inisheeran and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. His face does somehow look perfect for these roles, like he’s just drank four pints after taking four punches from Connor McGregor. However, this might be his best performance yet.
This is also Emerald Fennell’s (director of Promising Young Woman and Camilla in seasons 5-6 of The Crown) most confident movie yet. The cinematography is bold and stylized, spending a lot of time lingering on mirrors, windows, and bodily fluids like vomit on a sink or blood in a bathtub. Based on the visuals, you would be forgiven for assuming this an A-24 project. The nighttime scenes are drenched in moody and ominous lighting straight out of Euphoria, interspersed with dazzlingly bright daytime sequences that feel closer to Midsommar, were it not for “Time to Pretend” by MGMT blasting over the drunken tennis montage.
It’s a movie built around power and control, over money and social status, but also over information, between the characters and between Fennell and the viewer. Deceit is a major through line of the plot and like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, this movie jettisons the film you think you’re watching partway through and becomes something much more sinister. You enter it expecting a coming of age tale mixed with a queer love story and get a bleak, psychedelic, and darkly funny take on class hierarchy, old money decorum, and British stoicism.
I suspect it’s this bait and switch that led to some of the biggest backlash, most of which boils down to the movie not being what people expected or not having one clear theme or message. Reviewing it for The New York Times Wesley Morris dismissively wrote:
“I suppose Fennell has made a movie about toxic elitism, but she’s done it in the way Ikea gives you assembly instructions. And barely even that, since the most blatant class indictment is outsourced to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Rent” during a bout of actual karaoke with Oliver and Farleigh…The movie does for “posh” what “Soul Plane” did for “ghetto”: luxuriate in what it’s pretending to blow up.”
Even the normally charitable video essayists at The Take shared an analysis that criticized the movie as:
“uninterested in actually interrogating many of the themes it gestures at. Initially. hailed as an eat the rich film, it doesn’t actually seem that keen to examine wealth disparity or clashes between classes, the causes, the outcomes, the larger social ramifications.”
I push back on these critiques, starting with the fact that Fennell isn’t responsible for other people’s assumptions that any movie that touches on class must be yet another “eat the rich” satire. Claiming that something is hailed as one thing but turns out to be another reflects reductive marketing and hasty assumptions, not bad filmmaking.
Arguing that Fennell “doesn’t do anything” with all of the themes present assumes that the only way to include social themes in a film is to architecturally arrange them to spell out the takeaway in block letters. Where were these critics when Jordan Peele’s Us and Nope both turned out to be great despite refusing to deliver the same sort of tidy allegorical satire we saw in Get Out? Since when a movie have to telegraph the message or be about just one thing for us to agree it’s good?
The more legitimate critique of Saltburn in my opinion isn’t that it’s too vague in its takeaways, but too prescriptive. While the first two hours are full of dishonesty, devious manipulation, and ambiguity, the last seven minutes offer an airtight “what actually happened” sequence that delivers a rush of realization at the expense of leaving you room to arrive at your own conclusions. Instead of trusting you to interpret the movie by yourself, Fennell intervenes at the 11th hour to spoon-feed you the full timeline, causing Saltburn to hop genres one last time, turning what could have been an unsettling end to a psychological thriller into the crisp epilogue of a whodunnit.
Until the polarizing ending, however, I honestly appreciated how this movie didn’t hold my hand or force feed me any one message. Like Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, it merely took me on an intense journey full of powerful images and let me make of them what I wanted to. For what it’s worth, Fennell has repeatedly said that this movie isn’t about class, but about how longing, love, and lust, whether for a person, a higher station in life, or both, can devolve into toxic and destructive behavior.
This may have been her intent, but I actually found the class themes in this movie to be some of its strongest elements. Saltburn visualizes how the upper class use exclusive social events, fancy aesthetics, and stuffy customs to keep people out, a sort of social barbed wire preventing class mobility when literal walls fail. Tellingly, these are the very preppy obstacles that Keoghan’s Oliver sneaks around with lies, distorts with manipulation, and chillingly mimics by the end of the movie. Yet once he’s infiltrated the inner circle, he realizes that the people he once envied have grown soft in their affluence, closer to defenseless prey than admirable peers or desirable lovers. Fennell shows her hand the most when you realize the how many people compare Oliver to various animals: a snake, a spider, a moth, even a vampire. If Bong Joon Ho wants you to see how parasitic capitalism is, Emerald Fennell wants you to see that, beneath all the fancy curtains, class hierarchy isn’t just unfair, unkind, and dishonest, but fundamentally carnivorous.
What did you think of Saltburn and why was Rosamund Pike your favorite character?
Know someone who hasn’t stopped playing “Murder On The Dancefloor” since Saltburn came out? Send this article to them!
Are you a subscriber? It’s free, fun, and means you’ll never miss a post.