Telluride Awards Analysis: ‘Saltburn’ Could Return Emerald Fennell and Barry Keoghan to Contention

Saltburn, the second film written and directed by Emerald Fennell — three years after Promising Young Woman, for which she won the best original screenplay Oscar — had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival’s Palm Theatre on Thursday evening. And the picture, which Amazon plans to put into limited theatrical release on Nov. 24, and then open wide on Dec. 1, certainly left people talking.

A pitch-black comedy packed with sex, violence and music, like Fennell’s first film, Saltburn, which is set in the first decade of this century, chronicles the efforts of one young Oxford student (Barry Keoghan, an Oscar nominee earlier this year for The Banshees of Inisherin) to ingratiate himself into the life of another (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi). The latter invites the former to spend time with his extremely wealthy family — including his mother (Rosamund Pike), father (Richard E. Grant) and sister (Alison Oliver) — at their mansion, from which the film derives its title, resulting in power plays, head games and generally outrageous behavior.

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As THR’s David Rooney notes in his review, the film feels rather derivative — from, I would submit, Alfred Hitchcock’s early Hollywood films Rebecca and Suspicion to Sofia Coppola’s The Virigin Suicides to Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley to Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune and Single White Female, among other sources.

But, even so, it is consistently engaging and often hilarious, a testament to Fennell’s writing and, perhaps even more so, to her cast’s universally strong performances. The turn that stands the strongest shot of gaining awards traction is almost certainly Keoghan’s, a rising star who is given more of an opportunity to shine in this film than he has ever had before, bravely goes places not every actor would go and could follow in the footsteps of Carey Mulligan, who received a lead acting Oscar nom for Promising Young Woman (and also pops up in this film).

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