Saltburn is director Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman, which won her a writing Oscar, although there’s probably no danger of that here. This one borrows heavily from Evelyn Waugh, a bit from Patricia Highsmith, and eventually reveals itself to be enough of a mess that Fennell feels she needs to explain the whole thing to us, as if we didn’t already know what was happening.
Oliver is a student at Oxford who has no friends, partly because he’s socially awkward, and partly because the rich kids look down on scholarship kids like him. But he eventually falls in with Felix, who’s gorgeous and charming, and when summer comes, Oliver tells Felix his drug-addicted father has just died and he can’t go home, so Felix invites Oliver to his family’s castle, a literal castle out in the country, and of course Oliver accepts.
At some point things go sideways, and I guess I won’t reveal much of that here, although, again, we basically know what’s actually going on for most of the movie, even if it doesn’t really follow from the rest of what we see, and it’s all far less interesting than we might have hoped. And the way Fennell puts it all together doesn’t make a lick of sense—there’s one jarring set of scenes that makes you wonder if another crucial scene had been cut out of the film entirely, and while one character’s resulting personality change could maybe, kind of, make sense given the full context, it’s also wholly inconsistent with what else we’ve been shown of that character. And so by the time we get to the big “reveal,” it feels depressingly lazy, and it might be morally offensive if it weren’t so dull. On top of that, Fennell spells out exactly what’s been happening as if we’re children, though the saving grace here might be that it means the movie is about to end.
The acting is largely quite good, even if we do begin to feel a little embarrassed for some of what the actors have to put up with. Ultimately, though, it’s all a matter of respecting the audience—you don’t get to feed us nonsense and then expect us to thank you when you try to explain it.
Saltburn is in theaters.
