Tripwire Reviews Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn

Class Act?

Tripwire’s senior editor Andrew Colman takes a look at Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn out in cinemas…

Saltburn
Director: Emerald Fennell
Stars: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Rosamund Pike, Richard E Grant

After watching this film, one thing became apparent to me regarding arthouse movies from the UK – we don’t really do them, as such, at least not how they are mostly done in the rest of Europe or even America. Emerald Fennell’s second feature after the lauded Promising Young Woman is a gaudy, salty, brashly transgressive affair, yet it’s underpinned by very traditional tropes. And for all its ambition it can’t really make up its mind as to whether it’s darkly humorous hokum or scabrous, zany satire. In the end it’s a curate’s egg, but it’s certainly entertaining all the same.

The story is simple enough – socially awkward no-mark Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a first year student at Oxford from an apparently impoverished background, desperate to fit in amongst the beautiful, moneyed people around him. Within the first reel he has inveigled his way into the orbit of Felix (Jacob Elordi), an alpha male of immense privilege. The quietly introverted Oliver then finds himself the guest of his thoroughly aristocratic family, the owners of a sumptuous and opulent estate that becomes the focal point of the rest of the movie.

The family are old-school archetypal aristos – idle, hermetic, diffident, feckless, snooty and drowning. They are borderline caricatures, yet humanised enough that they can be laughed at – there’s Felix’s dad, Sir James (Richard E Grant), his wife Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike), Pamela (Carey Mulligan), Elsbeth’s dead weight friend, Venetia (Alison Oliver), Felix’s spoilt, abrasive yet perceptive sister, and Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), Felix’s brittle cousin from across the pond. All of them exude the type of stuffy, regressive, decadent Englishness that is rarely seen any more in cinema. Aside from the family’s batty dysfunction there are the servants, aloof and hovering silently in the background with repressed loathing – a brilliant counterpoint to all the insanity.

And in amongst them is outsider Oliver, getting lost in the mansion’s maze of rooms and corridors, desperate for Felix (the only aristo character with any genuine benevolence in his makeup)’s attention. Quick’s understated, almost inscrutable performance is of course an echo of a similarly sociopathic character, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley. As the movie unfolds we realize just how little we know about little Ollie, as he makes plays for various family members who, for the most part, see straight through him. Yet despite his shameless pathology, he’s the limpet who won’t leave, unlike the other “Felix’s summer friends” (as Venetia puts it) who are summarily dispensed with when the Autumn term begins.

Saltburn is a change of pace for British cinemagoers, a movie with pretensions that often resorts to the lowbrow. Its script is filled with clever, incisive one-liners, with Pike’s world-weary, disconnected Elsbeth getting the lion’s share of them – she is excellent, as is Grant as the fading grandee. Jacob Elordi, reminiscent in look and gait of a young Rupert Everett, is also pitch-perfect. What it lacks is heart, and more importantly consistency. Matt Damon’s Ripley is a remarkably nuanced, understated turn, while Keoghan’s Oliver is a meek, blank slate who occasionally erupts into dominance with manipulative force and control.

The movie has a similar tone to the bloated and fatuous The Favourite, but it’s better, influenced as it is by unassailable English classics that focus on class conflict and envy, such as Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets, Joseph Losey’s The Servant and Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract. The cinematography is lush and painterly, emphasising the bucolic, unreal nature of the aristos’ lives. It’s an arch and baroque movie, superficial like its ensemble and not all that memorable, but it plays, especially throughout Oliver’s birthday party sequence – all exclusive and alienating, delineating our protagonist’s failure and pathos. What lets it down are certain plotholes, and the fact that Fennell didn’t really know how to end the film – the shorthanded last twenty minutes really don’t work all that well and do test one’s disbelief.

Regardless of all that the movie is immersive and well-directed, despite its hollow core. In certain ways it seems dated, depending as it does from the over-familiar. Nevertheless, it’s a welcome exercise in retro-cinema, and it’s clear that there’s more and better to come from Fennell.

Saltburn is out in cinemas from this Friday 17 November. Here’s the film’s trailer