131 min | R | November 17, 2023 | Amazon MGM Studios
Oliver Quick is a scholarship student at Oxford who attaches himself to the rich and beautiful Felix Catton. Felix brings him home for the summer to Saltburn, the family’s enormous estate. Oliver wants this life, and he will do anything to take it.
Oliver Quick is a scholarship student at Oxford who does not belong. Felix Catton is rich, beautiful, and effortlessly liked. Oliver attaches himself to Felix, and Felix brings him home to Saltburn, the family estate that gives the film its name. The summer that follows looks like a fish-out-of-water story about a poor boy among aristocrats. It is really a study of appetite. Saltburn is about wanting another person’s life so badly that you will consume it.
Barry Keoghan plays Oliver with a flat, watchful stillness that reads as either worship or hunger. He holds his face blank and lets the audience guess which. Jacob Elordi plays Felix as a golden boy who collects strays and discards them without noticing the cruelty. Rosamund Pike plays Elspeth Catton, the mother, and delivers casual viciousness as if it were dinner conversation. Richard E. Grant plays Sir James as a man who has never once been told no. Carey Mulligan turns up as Pamela, a houseguest the family keeps and then tires of, and shows in a few scenes how Saltburn uses people up.
Emerald Fennell writes and directs, and she shoots the film in a boxy Academy frame that hems the characters inside hard edges. The square format turns the vast estate into a series of traps. Anthony Willis composes a score that swells with romantic grandeur even as the story curdles, and the mismatch is deliberate. The production design fills Saltburn with so much wealth that the rooms become oppressive rather than enviable. Fennell stages each set piece for maximum provocation. She wants the audience leaning forward and queasy.
Saltburn is built around shock, and Fennell trusts the shock to do the work that argument should. The provocations are vivid and the images stay with you. The class satire underneath them is thinner than the film believes. Fennell mistakes transgression for insight and gloss for depth. What remains is a gorgeous, vicious object that knows exactly how to disturb and never quite knows what it means. It is a film you remember without being sure it earned the memory.