'Saltburn' Review: It Must Be Seen to Be Believed
Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn is a massive improvement over Promising Young Woman and finally sees Jacob Elordi deliver a masterful performance.
When it was released, I was rather cold on Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, while the rest of the world waxed lyrical on Fennell’s writing and directorial powers. Perhaps I found it too showy, but the style never matched its substance despite a good lead performance from Carey Mulligan. When her latest production, Saltburn, was released on the festival circuit and received many varied reactions on how truly bonkers this movie is, I was still weary but looking forward to seeing what she and cinematographer Linus Sandgren were cooking.
While its flaws are glaringly apparent, the film is a massive improvement over her feature directorial debut, signalling a more assured and confident auteur who seemingly likes to elicit strong reactions from the audience, whether you want it or not. What’s interesting about this sophomore effort is how it starts as a simple coming-of-age tale, where student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) struggles to adapt to his newest environment at Oxford University.
One day, while riding his bicycle, he meets Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who has a flat tire and desperately needs help. Oliver tells him to take his bike instead, beginning a close friendship between him and Felix. After Oliver’s father passes away, Felix invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, where he meets his parents, Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) and Sir James (Richard E. Grant), his sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), and cousin, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) at the residence.
From there, the movie veers off into the psychological thriller. It becomes a sick and depraved condemnation of the ultra-rich’s way of life and how a middle-class student rose to the echelons of Saltburn by gaining Felix’s trust and wanting to be his friend. It doesn’t always work, and its “jaw-drop” of an ending is far too predictable to make an impact. Still, its ambition is more than laudable, thanks to its enveloping aesthetic and incredible performances from Elordi and Keoghan.
I’ve said this in my review of Priscilla on this website, but Elordi’s turns have so far not impressed me. While The Kissing Booth movies were far from his fault, Elordi’s screen presence in any film, including Priscilla, felt too soporific to have an impact. However, in Saltburn, Fennell seems to have studied Elordi’s traits as an actor and public figure. He knows exactly what works with his talents to turn him into a highly charismatic and layered performer. Elordi was born to play Felix Catton, embodying the charms of the “popular kid” in early scenes, only for Fennell to flip this trait to its head as Oliver arrives in Saltburn.
One scene in particular — where Felix thinks he’s doing a good deed to Oliver by making him drive to his mother’s house to make amends with her — is a brilliant showcase of his talents, especially when a filmmaker sees that he’s more than a “pretty face.” Sure, Sandgren’s 1.33:1 lens frames him as the hottest person who ever lived, capturing his perfectly formed pecs under the thick secondhand smoke of cigarettes with expert precision, but he’s far more than that. Fennell shows it to the world in ways Sofia Coppola (and even Adrian Lyne in Deep Water) couldn’t. For the first time in his career, Elordi is in perfect control of his emotions, exuding massive amounts of charm and sensuality when he needs to, and slowly drifts into a more complex portrayal when he starts to discover more about Oliver. Finally, Elordi is on track to be an even bigger star than he was while starring in lousy movies.
Keoghan is also utterly captivating here, cranking up the respective turns he gave in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Banshees of Inisherin to eleven. At times, he’s sincere, but he’s far creepier in the latter half of the movie, which ultimately shifts how he was introduced when Fennell first puts her camera on him. He captures the isolated spirit of an introverted outcast longing for friendship (without the courage to talk to the people he wants) and a terrifying side of him waiting to come out at the right time. The shift doesn’t work as well as Fennell wants it, but Keoghan is never dull, especially during that bathtub scene bound to break the internet.
Supporting turns from Pike and Grant are also excellent, but Madekwe and newcomer Alison Oliver make an even bigger impression than the seasoned veterans. Oliver shares one of the film’s best scenes, where Venetia unmasks Keoghan’s Oliver better than Felix, or even Farleigh, ever thought possible. It’s a massive shift in tone and atmosphere from what was initially presented, but Oliver is never the same after this encounter, leading to a finale that takes even more swings but doesn’t land as confident as Fennell wants.
Fennell takes many storytelling and thematic risks in Saltburn that she risks alienating many audience members who have no idea what kind of film they walked into. Some of the swings work incredibly well (such as a scene where Keoghan dances to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor bare-naked), but most don’t. A lot of it feels provocative for the sake of being provocative and doesn’t say much beyond the fact that these scenes are there to elicit disgust and shock in the audience.
Of course, some will argue that the aforementioned bathtub scene (the contents of that scene are not safe for work and a review, so you’ll have to see it on your own to discover what it entails) serves as a way to solidify Oliver’s obsessive thirst for Felix, but isn’t his gaze and constant circling his friends enough to see that he doesn’t just want to be friends with him? At some point, Fennell hits a cyclical rut in Saltburn’s 133-minute runtime where the story stretches itself so thin that she barely has anything of interest left to say despite actors giving their all.
Worse yet, the ending is so predictable that any attempt at a final reveal falls completely flat on its face. We learn more about Oliver during those moments, but it doesn’t read as a pivotal point in his arc. Instead, it feels cheap and smug, robbing audiences of true satisfaction as the plot slowly unravels to one of the biggest whimper final acts of the year. Everything can be seen a mile away, from the plot elements to its visual cues. And it feels too apparent for Fennell to choose the easy way out like this, especially after subverting audience expectations and making them squirm on many occasions.
Still, Saltburn is leaps ahead of Promising Young Woman. Her teaming up with Linus Sandgren to craft its visual palette was a stroke of genius. At the same time, she continues giving a suitable musical to its twisted world with composer Anthony Willis. And getting a good performance out of Jacob Elordi is a feat in and of itself. Turns out the only thing she had to do was to make him charming.