Even if you are suffering from eat-the-rich fatigue (see The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, The Lesson, Parasite, Bait, The White Lotus, Succession etc.) and can no longer work up much of an appetite for wealthy folk being dreadful you must make an exception for the psychological thriller Saltburn. It’s by Emerald Fennell and it’s not so much the story that will blow you away as her audacity. ‘Emerald, you’ve gone too far’ isn’t something she would ever be willing to hear.
Her first film, Promising Young Woman, was unafraid, perverse and thrilling and it’s the same with Saltburn. It’s Brideshead gone evil, some have said, with Tom Ripley vibes, and it is that – but Fennell is more daring than even Waugh or Highsmith. The audience gasped at certain points during the screening I attended. I was often watching though my fingers. It is fearless – and intoxicatingly so.
It is a dark satire about those who want in – and Oliver desperately wants in
The film opens at Oxford University and, as it’s 2006, it’s all Uggs and Juicy Couture (so that is our first horror right there). But I could take that, just about. That isn’t when I started watching though my fingers. It stars Barry Keoghan as Oliver Quick, a Northern boy on a scholarship, much derided by his better-off, somewhat caricatured peers. (‘He buys his clothes from Oxfam,’ one hisses.)
But as much as this is a dark satire about privilege it is also a dark satire about those who want in – and Oliver desperately wants in. He fixates on Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a fellow undergraduate who not only has the ease of old money but is also beautiful and adored and golden, always bathed in a shimmering light, like Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name.
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