Emerald Fennell has outdone herself with her sophomore feature SALTBURN, a sultry, deadly sensuous tale of white-heat obsession and backhanded usurpation. Shot in old TV 4:3 aspect ratio with a mesmeric retro sheen and palette, it focuses on Oliver Quick (Keoghan), an Oxford scholarship student, whose limerence over fellow student Felix Catton (Elordi), an Adonis born with a silver spoon, turns deceptively sinister after the latter invites him to stay in their palatial family estate in Saltburn for the summer holiday.

Opening in medias res, SALTBURN has Oliver breaking the four wall, talking about his feelings for Felix, intercut with footage of the latter glowing with heartthrob allure. “I love him, but am I really in love with him?” That is the question a viewer must suss out by their own reckoning. Oliver’s ingratiating his way into becoming Felix’s best friend recalls Anthony Minghella’s THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999), not least because of his latent homosexuality, but unlike Jude Law’s Dickie in Minghella’s masterpiece, Felix is fancy-free and too unserious to be tied down by relationship. Oliver must curry favor with Felix’s nuclear core and dispense with the major hindrance, in the person of Felix’s cousin Farleigh Start (Madekwe), whom he will tactfully seduce, manipulate and bad-mouth to cut loose from the family.

Upon arriving Saltburn, an old-money palace that dwarfs anyone’s wildest imaginings, Oliver learns an important lesson from “Poor Dear” Pamela (Mulligan, tricked out under a heavy slap and in a jaw-dropping, ostentatious dress sense), who obliviously overstays her welcome and will soon be jettisoned like a smelly fish. So underneath the ostensible “heart-of-gold-well-to-do” patina of Felix’s parents, Sir. Jame and Lady Elspeth (Grant and Pike), those who are vouchsafed with their generosity have a sell-by date. Oliver also gets wind of Felix falling out with his last year’s plus one, who gets improperly infatuated with Felix’s sister Venetia (Alison Oliver, really strutting her stuff in her feature film debut, her Venetia is rudderless damaged goods on the verge of self-annihilation), which flags up his precarity and he has no intention to be another “Poor Dear” Oliver.

Fennell’s script takes a certain artistic license when it concerns Oliver’s scheme to frame Farleigh and the reveal of Oliver’s home truth (he fails to notice a call from mommy on the cellphone doesn’t wash with his craftiness), but is at its most sardonic and ruthless to expose that the rich and privileged habitually feeds off on those less fortunate people’s woefulness and tragedies. They are thrilled, even galvanized by their addiction of “misery porn” so they can feel superiority and gain a semblance of self-worth, but at the same time, their fickle entitlement makes no qualms of high-hatting and deserting those whom they magnanimously allow to share their privileged life, and Oliver proves himself cunning enough to play along without offending his benefactors. However when the jig might be up, Oliver is also capable of destroying the beauty he loves in order to stay in the game, but not before pouring out his true feelings, with which Felix is too callous to empathize. His unconsummated desire finds a provocative, sepulchral outlet that leaves many clutch their pearls, and the symbolism of the maze scenes is a Dutch Angle revelation.

Henceforth, the downfall of the Cattons seems ineluctable, and their caping mechanism of profound loss and grief is a grotesque presentation of maintaining normalcy (strikingly accented by the crimson curtains, enveloping and turning the dining room into a Gothic purgatory), and when Oliver at last secures his ownership of Saltburn, Fennell ends the film with a bang, a total abandonment with Oliver in the buff, dancing to the tunes of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s disco anthem “Murder on the Dancefloor”, a testimony to the pure evil of unhealthy obsession, and the pernicious impact of classism where the balanced is tipped against the haves.

Keoghan, whose rugged features are a far cry from the traditional handsomeness, is a dangerous creature of guises, wiles and paradoxically, honesty (his craving for Felix has no pretense), putting on an innocuously leporine front without going overboard. At any moment, Keoghan keeps reminding audience that Oliver is more than what he is shown and behaves. His perverseness is rooted to the bone, whether it glistens through a glancing dart or in those more direct moments where he can soft-soap his way into high-wire psychological manipulation, Keoghan is an actor endowed with that rare quality to get under your skin when you feel powerless to defend. While Elordi is lensed through a career-defining hype of his gorgeousness, his Felix leaves a less indelible impression than Pike’s out-and-out oblivion of world-savvy agency. Her Lady Elspeth is so detached from the world she lives in and it almost makes her an unwitting laughing stock, who willingly bequeaths her fortune and estate to the guy who almost single-handedly deep-sixes her family, an irony of oceanic quotient, but nonetheless, courtesy to Pike’s open-faced transparency, audience can sympathize with her naivety, an undertone cannot be received willingly by inverted snobs. Like Bong Joon-ho’s PARASITE (2019), SALTBURN also bitingly anatomizes the gaping mental divide among modern society’s echelons, and packaged like a bacchanalian relic from the not-too-remote past (the story predominantly takes place between 2006 and 2007), a fearful sophomore slump is dexterously and soberly circumvented by Fennell and her crew, well done!

referential entries: Emerald Fennell’s PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (2020, 8.0/10); Anthony Minghella’s THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999, 8.4/10); Pier Paolo Pasolini’s THEOREM (1968, 7.3/10); Bong Joon-ho’s PARASITE (2019, 8.0/10)

Title: Saltburn

Year: 2023

Country: UK, USA

Language: English

Genre: Drama, Thriller, Comedy

Director/Screenwriter: Emerald Fennell

Music: Anthony Willis

Cinematography: Linus Sandgren

Editor: Victoria Boydell

Cast:

Barry Keoghan

Jacob Elordi

Rosamund Pike

Richard E. Grant

Alison Oliver

Archie Madekwe

Paul Rhys

Carey Mulligan

Ewan Mitchell

Reece Shearsmith

Dorothy Atkinson

Shaun Dooley

Joshua McGuire

Lolly Adefope

Rating: 8.1/10