Dead relly, dead relly, dead relly. As we jingle all the way back from the holiday season, the embers of Saltburn—Emerald Fennell’s hysterically bleak tale of money, class, and (spoiler alert) murder—are still smoldering. We’ve seen a Golden Globe nod for Barry Keoghan’s portrayal of orphan-presenting, bike-puncturing, malevolent flirt Oliver Quick, and another for Rosamund Pike’s Elspeth, a woman who, in the face of consecutive familial tragedies, is still compelled to make everything about herself: “It was all a bit too wet for me in the end.”
Echoes of Brideshead Revisited and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley quickstep through Saltburn’s aristocratic midsummer haze: There’s desire and disgust, partying and puking, scheming parasites, interloper rivalry, and menses drinking despite a disdain for runny eggs (okay, that’s less Brideshead). There’s homoeroticism as a tool for coercion and legitimate, quite-horny-actually homoeroticism. Does Oliver love Jacob Elordi’s Felix? Did he ever? Are we witnessing a lovesick pauper desperate to belong—to the object of his affection, to the one-rung-up peer group—at any cost? Or are we swimming in the wake of love gone sour, of corrupted longing? We are left intrigued and titillated as the film’s tonal zigzagging descends into a delicious, deplorable, rich-person farce. It’s fun—by God, it’s fun—but it’s also tricky to grasp quite what’s motivating each character. Oliver’s cruel intentions and dangerous liaisons never quite hit the dastardly but relatable altitudes of Tom Ripley.
Saltburn is awash with bodily fluids. And though we’re seeped in the bath slurping and, erm, grave humping, some moments feel a bit too on the nose: the angel wings, the devil horns, the murderer dancing to “Murder on the Dancefloor.” Because of it, nobody can quite seem to decide if they fully enjoyed their Saltburn screening. (I’m absolutely certain this was Fennell’s intention—to make something as delicious as it is unstomachable.) To further the you-just-don’t-get-it feeling, TikTok currently has a rash of socialites skipping through their Saltburn-like mansions (I think to prove they missed every note of the sardonic class satire).
In an early scene, Elspeth talks of a “complete and utter horror of ugliness,” and Fennell’s film lavishes in ugly acts and uglier arcs—a cacophony of icks. (It’s notably incredibly rare that a film contains a scene of a man fucking a fresh grave without said scene being central to the resulting discourse.) And the third act hits you like a third martini: You are dragged along on the potent tide, buoyed by memories of former rationality, grasping at understanding. I kept waiting for the film to sober up, for someone to realize things had gone too far, for an adult to intervene. When our seemingly soft protagonist is revealed to be Saltburn’s Keyser Söze, the string-pulling Geppetto to half a dozen Pinocchios, it’s not so much messy as silly. It’s an improbable finale, but so deeply have we dived into implausibility, so joyously have we submerged ourselves in stiff-upper-lip psychosis, so desensitized have we become to period sex and drain glugging and homosexual homicide, that it barely disturbs the surface when Oliver pulls a yard of medical pipe from a woman’s trachea. Olivers’s just another dastardly king en route to his castle, corrupted by excess.