Saltburn Is All Vibes and Empty Provocations

Emerald Fennell may be an exasperating filmmaker, but she’s incapable of being boring. Photo: MGM and Amazon Studios

This article was originally published on November 16. We are recirculating it now timed to Saltburn’s streaming debut on Prime Video. Be sure to also read our interviews with the bathtub scene’s foley artist and the final dance scene’s choreographer, and Roxana Hadadi’s analysis of the ending.

Emerald Fennell is great at montages and terrible at endings. That was very much the case with her Oscar-winning 2020 debut, Promising Young Woman, in which Carey Mulligan played a woman who’d immolated her own life after the suicide of a friend to act as a date-rape vigilante. It’s even truer of her second feature, Saltburn, a febrile thriller about an Oxford undergrad who befriends an aristocratic hunk of a classmate and gets invited to spend the summer at the guy’s country pile, an estate whose name gives the film its title. It’s too early in Fennell’s career to draw sweeping conclusions about her sensibility, but it feels fair to say that her more irritating habit as a writer is a fondness for button-pushing last acts that undermine all the character building that’s come before. She has plenty of strengths, among them the ebullient tempo of her work, an ability to hone in on themes that feel urgent even though they’re not explored in-depth, and, well, vibes. I don’t mean that to sound disdainful — while Promising Young Woman was darkly compelling until it turned frustratingly glib, Saltburn is a much sillier and emptier film. And yet its vibes are strong enough to sustain it right up until its final segment, when Fennell can’t help but once again blow up everything she’s built in favor of a finale that makes you feel a little dumb for being invested. Fennell may be an exasperating filmmaker, but she’s incapable of being boring.

Her latest protagonist, on the other hand, is very concerned about being seen as uninteresting and relegated to social invisibility because of it. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is an oddball who arrives at Oxford in 2006 to find his classmates to be a cohort of the beautiful, moneyed elite whose eyes slide right over his jacket-and-tie-clad form without even registering it. His tutorial partner is a disdainful American named Farleigh Start (an amusingly bitchy Archie Madekwe), who’s often late and lazy, but who’s also a legacy student fluent in the dialects of class that Oliver can’t follow. His only companion is an uptight math student — in what’s less a friendship than two outcasts hanging out together due to necessity — but then he has a run-in with the beautiful, popular Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the son of nobles who seems to move through a sunnier, more pleasant reality than the one Oliver’s been trudging through. When he’s at Felix’s side, that exclusive kingdom opens to him, though he’s aware that his welcome isn’t a permanent one. Sensing how easily Felix could leave him behind, Oliver opens up about his rough background — his parents’ addiction and mental-health issues, his father’s abrupt death — and just like that, he’s invited to Saltburn for the summer, for the kind of low-key hang that involves butlers and formalwear dinners.

Saltburn can be shorthanded as Brideshead Revisited by way of The Talented Mr. Ripley, though it’s the former that’s the primary reference point. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel, middle-class Charles Ryder falls in love with the patrician Flyte family, with their Catholicism, and with the fading remnants of their upper-class way of life. In Saltburn, Oliver may or may not be in love with Felix, a question he ponders over lascivious opening shots of his object of obsession. But there’s no doubt that he has a full-on affair with the Cattons’ wealth, which includes a manor house whose many rooms and priceless historical items Felix introduces with an entertaining offhandedness. Like Sebastian Flyte, Felix has a sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), who eyes Oliver as a possible romantic interest, as well as an unflappable mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and father, James (Richard E. Grant), who have the kind of eccentricity reserved for the very rich. Oliver’s not the only hanger-on, either — Farleigh is staying there too, revealed to be a poor relation, as well as Pamela (Carey Mulligan), a high-fashion friend of Elspeth’s whose life is a string of lousy relationships.

Fennell, the child of a celebrity jewelry designer who graduated from Oxford herself right around the time her fictional characters arrive there, has clearly spent time in the orbit of Felixes, and the film’s witty depictions of the lingering formalities and casual indulgences of the family’s life feels very precise. Saltburn feels like it should be a showcase for Keoghan, a mercurial scene-stealer who plays Oliver as a gnomish invader. And indeed, it’s Oliver with whom the film’s dramatic tension lies — he at first looks to be scrambling desperately to make the most of his luck but is increasingly less naïve and more forceful in his pursuits. Still, it’s Elordi the film is smitten with, the camera lingering on his smile as if it’s the source of the golden afternoon sunlight, or zooming in for a close-up of the sweat beading on the hair behind his ear. Saltburn pokes fun at the subdued homoeroticism of the Waugh book by having Oliver literally drink Felix’s bathwater in a lustful fervor, but ultimately, the Brideshead of it all just functions as the long windup to an underwhelming punch line.

All of Fennell’s most luscious montages, including a particularly delicious one set to MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” that finds the characters playing tennis in formalwear while drinking Champagne from bottles, are about the fabulousness of life on the Catton estate and of the family’s young heir. It’s more and more of a bummer when the music stops and she has to move the plot along, especially when all she can serve up is a twist that’s less eat the rich than be the rich. Saltburn’s seductive imagery outweighs its obvious attempts at provocation. And while it does end up making being rich look pretty sweet, that’s not exactly a revelation worth hanging a whole movie on.