Film Review: "Saltburn" and the Pleasures of Provocation
Emerald Fennell's sophomore effort invites viewers to abandon themselves to the darker side of the human id.
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Judging by social media discourse, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn just may be the most divisive film of 2023. Though it has a reasonably decent Rotten Tomatoes score (for what that’s worth), it has earned some critical drubbing for what some have seen as either its glitzy emptiness or its mishandled critique of the British class system. For my part, I found it an absolute pleasure from beginning to end, a testament to the enduring power of the cinema to provoke us, to indulge us, and to slake our desire for the transgressive.
When the film begins, young Oliver Quick has just enrolled at Oxford, where he manages to befriend the glowing and handsome Felix, wealthy aristocrat, who subsequently invites Oliver to spend the summer at his family estate, Saltburn, where they join several other members of the family. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that there is far more to Oliver than was at first obvious, and that he has his eyes set on the glorious mansion. By the end of the film he has managed to dispatch all of the members of the family and, as Sophie Ellis Baxter’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” plays, he dances through his ill-gotten property.
There’s no question that part of the film’s pleasure stems from the deliberately-provocative performances of its main cast. Barry Keoghan, as Peter Debruge of Variety remarks, has a certain feral darkness about him; you get the sense right away that there’s far more going on beneath that seemingly beat-down exterior than he will ever really let on. Jacob Elordi is also perfectly-cast as golden boy Felix, bringing the same effortless (yet also slightly dangerous) charisma to the role that he brought to this year’s Priscilla. Archie Madekwe is sublimely bitchy as biracial cousin Farleigh Start, who takes an immediate dislike to Oliver and does everything he can to make his life miserable. Even he, however, soon finds that Oliver is a far more subtle opponent than he realized.
For my money, though, Rosamund Pike deserves all of the awards for her portrayal of Elspeth, Felix’s mother. By turns icy cruel and strangely warm, Pike endows Elspeth with all of the daffiness we would expect of an aristocrat of her age. She’s someone capable of throwing Oliver–a young man she barely knows–a lavish birthday party with hundreds, even as she is also quite willing and able to dismiss the suicide of her supposed best friend, Pamela (played by a criminally underused Carey Mulligan). Pike makes for a perfect pairing with Richard E. Grant, who plays her abstracted and more than a little daffy husband, Sir James.
From Saltburn’s arch and bleakly funny perspective, none of these people, including Oliver, are particularly likable. Thus, despite the constricting Academy ratio–which, in addition to giving the film an intense feeling of voyeurism, also generates a feeling of stifling personal intimacy–we aren’t led to like them or care about their ultimate fates. There is, indeed, something vicariously delicious about Oliver’s murderous streak, particularly given Farleigh’s undeniable cruel streak and the implication that Felix has a habit of bringing foundlings home only to lose interest in them. It’s all a bit like A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (one of the film’s other obvious intertexts), in that we find ourselves perversely wanting Oliver to succeed in his efforts to claim all of Saltburn for himself.
Indeed, many of the film’s transgressions involve Oliver’s desire to thwart any and all boundaries, whether spiritual, physical, or sexual. In a pair of notorious scenes he performs oral sex on Felix’s sister while she is menstruating and also drinks Felix’s semen-laden bathwater. Not content with this, he even goes so far as to strip naked and fornicate with Felix’s freshly-dug grave. There is, it seems, nothing that Oliver won’t do in his frantic desire to possess all of Saltburn, though notably his reasons for wanting to do so are left relatively unexplained. The nearest we get to a motivation is the plot twist that reveals his true parentage: far from the child of drug addicts, as he’d claimed, he is in fact from an upper-middle-class neighborhood and his supposedly-recently-deceased father is still very much alive.
The film’s absolute commitment to its own debauchery helps to explain, I think, why it remains so ideologically muddled. From one point of view it looks like a scathing takedown of the oblivious and narcissistic British aristocracy, which is so morally bankrupt and emotionally stunted it can barely find it within itself to actually mourn its own family members once they start dropping like flies. From another, it looks like a cautionary tale about the dangers of letting someone from the grubby middle classes into the rarefied space of a great house. It might be a tad too harsh to say that Saltburn is all shock and no substance.
In any case, it seems to me that it’s ultimately a waste of time to try to wring some sort of coherent message out of Saltburn. Unlike Promising Young Woman, which was very much a film with a point (and a very wickedly delivered one, I might add), Fennell’s sophomore effort is designed to be flagrant and little else. Rather than see this as some sort of artistic failing, however, I think that this is the source of its unexpected brilliance. There are indeed times when you just want to indulge in the darker side of the human id, untroubled by such things as messages and themes and purposes. Saltburn gives us the chance to do exactly that, without letting us off the hook by giving us a deeper meaning to justify the cruelty and the barbarism.
A feast for the eyes and the senses, Saltburn is an aptly titled film. It stings and it burns, shocking us out of our complacency even as it indulges our darkest whims, whether it’s taking illicit queer pleasure in Oliver’s encounters with men and women or his luxuriously nude dance through the opulently-appointed halls of Saltburn with all of their trappings, their Shakespeares and objets d’art, all the reminders of what he has yearned for but never possessed.
In the end, we are all Oliver, and therein lies the film’s uniquely transgressive power.