Saltburn: Calculated, callous, and grotesquely gorgeous

There is a lot of mystery surrounding Emerald Fennell’s new film Saltburn, which kicked off Austin Film Festival last Thursday. Its glossy marketing showcases an impressive and dazzling cast draped around fabulous set pieces and reveals just enough debauchery to let your mind wander into treacherous places. Fennell’s electrifyingly confrontational debut, Promising Young Woman, was polarizing and thought-provoking–almost assuring a certain level of intrigue for her sophomore project. Its sense of secrecy is just one of the tantalizing elements of Saltburn, which places stars Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi in one picturesque UK location after another. Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a member of Oxford University’s class of 2006 who finds himself isolated from the chic and self-assured student body surrounding him. Oliver’s luck turns around, however, when his path crosses with the stunningly statuesque Felix (Elordi), and an unexpected friendship forms. 

 Like a modern-day, gender-skewed Jane Eyre, Oliver’s lower-class, humdrum existence is quite charming to Felix’s bourgeois savior complex, and soon Oliver receives an invite to spend a Summer at Felix’s lavish family’s estate: Saltburn. Within the walls of this daunting and cavernous castle live the rest of the Catton family, their endless staff of subordinates, and a handful of other poor, unfortunate souls like our protagonist–whose misfortunes entertain and fascinate this malicious ménage. Something that Felix nor his judgmental entourage could predict, though, is how well Oliver’s keen perception and scrappy modes of manipulation fit in at Saltburn. 

 Felix is the kind of beautiful and privileged that warps one's ability to discern and empathize properly, and the rest of his family is no different. His mother, Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike), hoards secrets and needy friends like Pamela (Carey Mulligan)–whom Elsbeth helps just as swiftly as she condemns. His sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) is just as attractive but much more insecure, and his father (Richard E. Grant) seems utterly unaffected by the shit-talking and backstabbing that regularly-occurs under his roof. The Catton family is equally elegant as they are unsophisticated. They pick and choose which traditions and etiquettes to abide by, and eschew all responsibility, niceties, and subtlety. The complicated friendship that blooms between Oliver and Felix faces a similar dichotomy. Their connection is simultaneously radiant and repulsive, genuine and manufactured, and constantly vacillating between friendly and competitive.

 Oliver, humble as he is, somehow has sexual tension with every character, including Farleigh (Archie Madekwe)–seemingly the only member of this family who can detect Oliver’s slyness. The banter between these two is curious and anxiety-inducing, as Farleigh’s slightly strained connection to the Catton family is threatened by Oliver’s shiny, new presence. The entire ensemble is calculated, callous, and grotesquely gorgeous–all elements I now come to expect from a Fennell affair. All of the aspects to be admired about Promising Young Woman–the boldness, the specificity of its depravity, the thoughtful consideration that went into its references and music and casting–are elevated to the highest degree in Saltburn, with the added perk of a delightfully dark sense of humor. While its dreamy aesthetic and dreamboat leads could easily cloud one’s viewing experience, there is still plenty of sticky, twisted substance to this remarkably stylish film. 

 Fennell’s wicked wit and careful direction are simply addicting, and the attention to detail in Saltburn is just as heavenly as the subjects she’s capturing. The way the camera considerately traces every inch of Jacob Elordi’s sweaty, breathing body was astounding, and to see him break out of his one-dimensional bad-boy Euphoria archetype with ease was invigorating. Unsurprisingly, Barry Keoghan gives a knock-out performance that cautiously toes the line between sympathetic and sickening. And when the two are together on screen, something magical and combustive happens.

 There is an exciting sense of possibility and peril burning beneath this film at all times. Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi can both embody the role of a scoundrel expertly, and the scope of their sexual deviance reaches thrilling, illicit, and shocking depths that have to be seen to be believed. Fennell tests the limits of what we as an audience find alluring, pleasurable, and discomforting. She imagines people and places that on the surface seem refined, only to turn them all on their decadent, repugnant heads. It is a disgustingly, confusingly enjoyable spectacle of carnage and carnality–even for a sicko like this critic, there was never a shortage of things to gawk at. ​​No matter how despicable it gets, watching this story unfold is undeniably satisfying–the dangerous kind of satisfaction that makes your heart race and your face feel hot, the scratch-an-itch-until-you-bleed kind of satisfaction.

Saltburn is an exquisitely suspenseful ride full of beauty, brutality, and homoerotic anxiety. It’s the kind of gothic horror story that could’ve been written by a Brontë, but its ultramodern flair and mid-2000s nostalgia doesn’t make it any less timeless. Saltburn cleverly conveys the prickliness of human desire, and how lost we can become in our pursuit of our deepest, darkest wants. Never in my wildest, horniest, Tumblr-era dreams could I have envisioned a film so unabashedly erotic and fantastical as Saltburn–and I eagerly await the fanfiction that will undoubtedly ensue once this film gets its wide release.