The prophetic jumble of voyeuristic images that greet us in the opening moments of Emerald Fennell’s second directorial debut Saltburn construct a mesmerising festival of sharp compositions and saturated colours: quickly morphing from mere indulgence to expressions of rich symbolism under the eyes of its audience.
Linus Sandgren’s cinematography reveals a world which criticises and glorifies the spectacle of upperclassmanship in ravenous detail. As the title card bolts out over Cambridge’s stony walls, vines sprawling in school-boy graffiti from the lettering, Saltburn’s introduction acts as a neatly packaged prognosis on what is to come, briefly revealed to us and concluded like the practiced lick and seal of an envelope.
Saltburn is The Talented Mr Ripley if Anthony Minghella’s adaptation were double as dark, a hundred flavours more stylistic, and engorged by the raw sensuality of any Luca Guadagnino film. Ever and unavoidably typecast, Barry Keoghan dons the guise of oddball outsider Oliver Quick. Quick is a melting pot of anxiety and intellect befriended by Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the disarmingly charismatic heir to a wealthy English family. After tragedy strikes, Oliver is invited to join Felix at his family’s manor for the summer, and we watch as he acclimatises to a life adorned by the wild ceremonies of wealth.
The working class Oliver wanders into Saltburn Manor with little of the charm that grants the rest of the cast their intrigue. Instead he ‘skulks’ through the corridors in the early scenes, before paralleling the film’s march into steady mayhem at the runtime extends.
If to win an Oscar is to throw oneself into the bleakest possible depths of an actor’s potential – we will not soon forget the horrifying ordeal Leonardo Dicaprio underwent to land a place at the Academy Awards table – then Keoghan has certainly, surely, earned himself (at the very least) a leading man nomination with Saltburn. He is an actor with all the pleasant unpredictability of a Russian Nesting doll. Each time I think he simply cannot top his last role, a new character is revealed that is twice as splendidly malicious as his previous one.
Contrastingly, Jacob Elordi is an actor that has always been difficult to pin down amidst the somewhat painful apathy of Nate Jacobs, his best-known role in HBO’s hit teenage drama Euphoria. Yet as the sweet heir Felix, Elordi is granted the opportunity to express character complexity in cheesy expressions and a fervent British accent rather than through the hostile looks and brief outbursts of a sociopathic teen.
For a script to impose itself with a large amount of British slang is typically synonymous with a writer unintentionally ‘cringing out’ their audience. And yet the slang Fennell includes feels entirely natural; excluding the moments in which it emerges from Rosamund Pike’s mouth, wherein it takes on the vivid quality of the second-hand embarrassment felt when your own mother is desperately attempting to outlive her generation. As Felix’s vacuous mum Elsbeth, Pike gives what is surely the comedic role of a lifetime, delivering effortless one-liners as she treads the undefinable line between the hilarious and the tragic ignorance of a vastly wealthy parent.
Fanciful dinners, indulgent pool-days and dreamy Midsommar Night’s raves explode with carefully placed party strings, wine bottles and well-angled limbs- not to mention a 2000s soundtrack to die for. Yet to say that excess in Fennell’s film is a reflection of class is only half the story. Snippets of glistening masculine necks and backs encourage the female gaze to reign supreme, and in doing so erect a ravenous relationship between sex and class.
If, at its core, sex is power in Saltburn, Keoghan attempts to propel himself above his station in the most brutal of ways. Whilst some of the more pornographic moments are particularly startling, their shock-factor clearly belies a very raw exploration of the thematic questions Fennell repeatedly brushes upon within the script.
Saltburn is the sort of film that denies you the hassle of understanding what is happening and why it is happening and encourages you to engorge yourself on the privilege of instead feeling your way through the entanglement of narrative. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is, all in all, a visual display of extravagance that satirises the world of wealth Oliver finds himself embroiled within, but also acts as an artifice for the turmoil which lays beneath the surface of wealth.
What initially seems a demonisation of the rich slowly becomes an inquiry surrounding victimhood in the middle and upper classes. Fennell leaves you with the sensation that there is certainly much to be unpacked within Saltburn, but that scraping beneath the skin of the world is a daunting operation.
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