Saltburn

I loved it, but was I in love with it?

“You’d think she was a riot to look at her! But there was absolutely nothing going on underneath,” Elsbeth Catton observes in Saltburn (2023), Emerald Fennell's latest psychological thriller and black comedy. It’s a barb that seems to double as a thesis for the film—except that Saltburn doesn’t suffer from emptiness so much as excess, its surfaces so busy they threaten to smother whatever lies below.

Barry Keoghan in Saltburn.

As evidenced in Promising Young Woman (2020), Fennell is a master of style and mise-en-scène, building worlds as glittering and captivating as her moniker. Visually, her darkly-funny psychological thriller Saltburn is sublime. Drenched in decadence. Almost odious in its opulence. The dialogue is gleefully sharp and black. The performances are nuanced and provocative. And yet there is just one, but one major, shortcoming of Saltburn.

Because while both films deal with outsiders driven by obsession, where Promising Young Woman had a believable character with a clear goal, propelling its lead, Cassandra (also played by Mulligan) forward, I just couldn’t get behind Oliver. It felt like Saltburn sacrificed character development in preference of plot. And because plot and character development aren’t mutually exclusive—the film suffers.

Saltburn centres around Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) a dazzlingly bright but darkly reclusive Oxford scholarship boy “dressed by Oxfam”. He’s an outsider in this world of privilege and old money and he’s painfully aware of it. Through a thousand cuts of hard-to-watch elite class flexes, Oliver is forced to know his place. Intelligence isn’t enough of a survival mechanism here. The film’s theme of power, and the animalistic struggle for it, is established.

And then there’s Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), an almost otherworldly creature for whom doors, opportunities and legs open with ease. Instantly, Oliver is beguiled. Here is a man who moves through the world with an easy grace. Someone who has never struggled or wanted for anything.

Over the course of a series of simultaneously serendipitous and unfortunate events, Oliver and Felix become inseparable and Oliver is invited to spend the summer with the Cattons at their home AKA estate AKA arousingly ostentatious castle. And it’s here that most of the film unfolds and where cinema-goers must figure out who is the hunter and who is the hunted. An earlier scene provides a clue: Oliver watches Felix from afar, smoking a cigarette. Its glowing red ember is reminiscent of the Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a sophisticated foreshadowing: beware of those who seem compliant—they might just get a taste for the blood of the hand that feeds them.

Like Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Saltburn features the infiltration of a wealthy family and (accidentally?) Falling In Love along the way. But unlike Scorcese’s film, you don’t fully buy its web-spinning protagonist. And this is not because of Keoghan’s performance—it’s because of how Oliver’s character is written.

The charmed world of Oxford and the Catton’s is brought to life by Fennell with a natural ease—unsurprising, given she studied there herself. But Oliver’s world, and that of his middle-class parents in Prescot, Liverpool (a postcode the Cattons are comically unfamiliar with), feels comparatively underexamined. That imbalance makes it difficult for even Barry Keoghan’s otherwise truthful performance to fully convince.

The issue isn’t that Oliver is middle-class. Nor is it that he’s lonely, socially maladroit, or even quietly sociopathic—an outsider “always beetling away on his own,” desperate for connection and approval. It’s that the film seems to lean too heavily on his class position as sufficient motivation for the ferocity of his desire: not just for Felix, but for wealth, status, and total immersion in the Cattons’ world. The scale of Oliver’s hunger feels out of proportion to the life he’s supposedly escaping.

That’s where the logic starts to fray. Oliver begins to feel less like a psychologically coherent character and more like a device, bent to the film’s needs rather than driven by impulses that feel earned. At times, this makes Saltburn feel provocative for provocation’s sake—certain scenes tipping into the contrived, even faintly silly.

By the end, I wasn’t so much puzzled as unconvinced. I can live with ambiguity. What’s harder to shake is the sense that the film never quite earns its answer to the simplest question it poses: but why?

Despite some lingering questions over Oliver’s motivations, Saltburn is worth the watch and cements Fennell as an inventive and entirely original triple-threat (writer, producer, director). The film’s performances, direction, cinematography, dialogue, and art direction are all superb. In the moments where Fennell explores emotional incapacity and the stiff-upper-lip mentality of the British, she excels. In a particularly standout scene, her deft handling of the shock of grief and the absurdity of the hyper-normal in times of grief elicited the feeling of being in a live-theatre show. It’s in moments like this, where the audience is anchored in a room and we’re not distracted so much with how things look but encouraged to focus on the power dynamics and emotions of the characters that Fennell demonstrates her real directorial skill.

The writing is instantly memorable—meme-able, even. Sharp, acidic, cold-blooded and darkly funny, much like its characters. Oliver and Felix crackle with chemistry. Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant are superb as awful, gloriously detached, faintly deranged aristocrats. And for millennials, the 2006-era soundtrack rips you out of any when-did-I-stop-looking-like-I-was-in-a band malaise and drops you straight back into those Peak Hedonism™ days.

If Saltburn falters at all, it’s not for a lack of depth but an excess of ambition—there’s almost too much going on beneath the surface. Still, one thing’s certain: it’s a lush, lurid, delightfully sumptuous riot. A warning: best not to slurp your drink too loudly in this one. (It’ll make sense after That Bath Scene.)