Emerald Fennell Soaks in Sexy Boys and Sleepy Class Satire in Saltburn: Review
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Emerald Fennell Soaks in Sexy Boys and Sleepy Class Satire in Saltburn: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: It’s 2006: MGMT plays on the radio, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest tears up the box office, and young Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) arrives at Oxford to begin his studies. He’s shy, awkward, unassuming; while the rich kids party and carouse around him, the unconnected “scholarship kid” gets stuck on the NFI list: Not. Fucking. Invited.
Still, fortune smiles on him, and so does Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the ravishing young prince of the Oxford party scene. For one reason or another, he takes a shine to Oliver — is it real friendship? Is it pity? Charity? The audience’s guess is as good as anyone’s. Since Oliver’s tales of home are full of weary and woe, Felix offers to let him crash at his family’s prewar palatial estate, Saltburn. There, he finds himself living and partying among Felix’s clan, including his father (Richard E. Grant), mother (Rosamund Pike), and sister Alison Oliver), as well as the various contemporaries and hangers-on that surround the golden boy (like Archie Madekwe’s Farleigh, Felix’s previous bestie and the one person who smells something off about Oliver).
Amid the glitz, glamour, and sex of Saltburn, with its expansive courtyards and hedge mazes littered with G-strings, confetti, and champagne bottles, Oliver struggles to maintain his place in the pecking order. Does Felix return Oliver’s infatuation, or does the object of his affection see him, in turn, as yet another plaything?
Time to Pretend: Much like Emerald Fennell’s 2020 debut Promising Young Woman (a scathing yet hollow takedown of rape culture that nonetheless won Fennell an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), Saltburn feels like a dizzying clash of old and new, a provocative jab in the eye of good taste that revels in the nastiness of its characters to reveal the darker parts of ourselves and the society that builds us.
Or, at least, that’s what it gestures toward on the surface; try as it might to land some deeper satirical blows, Saltburn feels an uneven gumbo of Brideshead Revisited, Euphoria, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and an American Apparel commercial.
But what glorious, alluring surface it is: A young, sexy cast of the UK’s finest (and we do mean finest) up-and-coming (and we do mean coming) stars, playing psychosexual mind games with each other and engaging in deranged erotic play in front of Linus Sandgren’s moody 35mm lens.
Saltburn (Amazon MGM Studios)
Keoghan, a master at playing the fuzzy line between adorable and creepy, lends Oliver the feeling of a lost, lovesick puppy and a Machiavellian manipulator from one scene to the next. In one moment, he could be dreaming moon-eyed at Felix, Fennell teasing us with Elordi’s pits the same way Tarantino leers at toes. In the next, he’s speaking poisoned words into a rival’s ears, disarming them with his own sexual advances.
Fennell delights in the lurid, liberating, destructive nature of sex, and that’s Saltburn’s strongest suit. While the Brideshead comparisons are apt, there’s more than a bit of Pasolini’s Teorema in here, with Keoghan in the part of Terence Stamp, a sexy termite set to tear down the house he’s living in brick by brick, then setting up shop there himself. He’s a successor to Tom Ripley in a way, luring you in with honey till he gets what he wants — then disposing of you.
I Love You, You Pay My Rent: But for all the surface-level gauze and the moment-by-moment delights of young sexy people doing young sexy things you don’t normally see on camera (drinking bathwater, stripping, and making love to a freshly-made gravesite), Saltburn doesn’t feel like it has much going on under the hood. Perhaps that’s on purpose: After all, a cast full of vapid characters can only concern themselves with vapid things. But it feels like Fennell grasps for some grander target — the vicissitudes of the wealthy, the silver spoons that rot rich kids’ brains — that the bloated runtime and shallow characters don’t really land on.
Saltburn (Amazon MGM Studios)
The supporting cast has a ball, though, especially the elder statesmen of the crumbling edifice: Richard E. Grant’s blinkered, childlike father, Rosamund Pike’s droll ex-model mother, a hilarious cameo by Carey Mulligan as a mayfly houseguest who, try as they might to prod, simply won’t vacate the premises. She, like Oliver, understands all too well the pull of Saltburn’s mix of privilege and hedonism; where she fails, Oliver might just succeed.
The Verdict: The glitzy, summery surface of Saltburn is nothing to shy away from: it’s fitting that it hits wide release the same week Consequence celebrates the complicated history of sex in cinema. It’s steamy and transgressive in a straightforward way, an in-your-face bacchanal of sex and violence of the kind Fennell so delights in depicting. But as the film barrels toward its bonkers but highly predictable twist, the shine on Saltburn begins to fade. In the end, Fennell’s latest resembles a sugar high: invigorating in the moment but insubstantial once it wears off.
Where to Watch: Saltburn lures you in with candy-coated excess, then springs its trap in theaters November 17th.
Trailer:
Emerald Fennell Soaks in Sexy Boys and Sleepy Class Satire in Saltburn: Review
Clint Worthington
Popular Posts
