This article was originally published on November 17. We are recirculating it now timed to Saltburn’s streaming debut on Prime Video. Be sure to also read Alison Willmore’s review of the film and our interviews with the bathtub scene’s foley artist and the final dance scene’s choreographer.
The sample size is small, but based on Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, filmmaker Emerald Fennell loves an outrageous, montage-heavy ending. In 2020’s Promising Young Woman, Cassie’s plan to get revenge against her former classmates who raped her best friend and destroyed their lives endures from beyond her grave, with a series of text messages and a package full of evidence leading to the arrest of the guilty men after they murder Cassie and burn her body. Saltburn takes that death count and multiplies it, with anti-hero Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) pulling off a class-warfare coup, a series of murders, and an elaborate nude-dance sequence in the mansion he’s swiped from the aristocratic family he claims to have loved and hated in equal measure. How did Saltburn get there — and does its final 20 or so minutes feel cathartic or clumsy? Let’s discuss!
Saltburn starts off with Oliver seemingly being interviewed about Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the classmate with whom he had a Tom Ripley/Dickie Greenleaf type relationship. From the beginning, Oliver has a real scorn toward women (“Christ, the girls. It was embarrassing, reallyâ€) and somewhat contradicts himself when trying to explain how he regarded Felix: “I wasn’t in love with him, although everyone thought I was … I loved him, I loved him, I loved him. But was I in love with him?†The question of what Oliver actually felt for Felix then becomes the main lens through which we view the events of the film, which start in earnest in 2006, when the two are first-year college-mates at Oxford.
Felix is a scholarship kid ignored by his mostly posh peers, and it doesn’t help that he’s kind of weird — standoffish, defensive, and obviously a little besotted with the popular Felix, on whom he spies every chance he gets. But when Oliver comes to Felix’s aid by lending him his bike when Felix’s is busted, he gets invited into Felix’s inner circle. The two become close quickly, with Felix throwing out “I love you’s,†taking pity on Oliver’s comparatively low finances and his poor relationship with his mentally ill, drug-addicted parents, and gently mocking Oliver’s stiff personality and overly accommodating deference. After Oliver’s father dies and Oliver says he’ll never go home again, Felix invites him to vacation with him at his family estate, Saltburn. “Just be yourself; they’ll love you,†Felix says, and so Oliver gets folded into the Cattons.
Do they love him? Not immediately! Felix’s cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), whose education is funded by Felix’s father, Sir James (Richard E. Grant), mistrusts Oliver, as does the family butler, Duncan (Paul Rhys). Felix’s mother, Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike), and sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) treat him a bit like a fascination, with the former trying to pump him for information about his depressing family life and the latter blithely insinuating that Felix will grow bored of him by referring to “last year’s one,†a former friend that Felix has since dropped. Oliver eventually wins them over, though, with increased confidence (his muscular and, it’s suggested, well-endowed body inspiring a “what a twist†from Felix, Farleigh, and Venetia as they sunbathe naked), unexpectedly filthy and slightly sadomasochistic sexual experiences with Venetia and Farleigh, and relentless flattery toward Elsbeth. At events, Oliver is reminded that he doesn’t really belong here, at a place where people eat dinner in black-tie outfits and no one knows his name. But Saltburn gets a lot of deliciously nasty impact out of Oliver’s increasing depravity, and what initially looks like his downfall.
After Felix becomes annoyed that Oliver hooked up with Venetia, Oliver starts ignoring her, leading her to calling him “just another one of [Felix’s] toys.†After Oliver’s actual normalcy is discovered by Felix (no dead dad, no abusive mom, just two totally average people living in a pleasantly suburban house), Felix calls him “a fucking liar†and says Oliver makes his “blood run cold.†And after Felix mysteriously dies after Oliver’s birthday party, it seems that the suspicions of Farleigh, Venetia, and Duncan will finally be acknowledged, and Oliver’s duplicity will be found out. Doesn’t his present-day interview resemble an interrogation? Isn’t the bland room in which those scenes are shot similar to a holding cell? Fennell has no interest in punishing Oliver, though, and in the film’s final act, Saltburn stops being about Oliver and Felix, and starts being about Oliver and the Cattons overall. If he couldn’t have Felix, Oliver would steal his life instead, and that heist is explained in the film’s final moments.
It plays out like this. Felix’s death splinters the Cattons. Elsbeth practically forbids Oliver from leaving (he’s done a good job convincing her that he’s the only person who really understands her, more than her husband and her friends), and he hangs around while Farleigh is kicked out because Sir James blames him for Felix’s drug use and Venetia kills herself out of guilt. Sir James finally gets Oliver to leave — it’s unclear whether he accepts a bribe or is simply expunged — and in a time-jump to 15 or so years later, Oliver reads about Sir James’s death in the newspaper. He runs into Elsbeth, who greets him fondly, admits her loneliness, invites him back to Saltburn, and signs the estate over to him after she falls sick. At first, Oliver was only guilty of being a manipulator. But then Fennell reveals that Oliver’s narration isn’t part of an inquisition or cross-examination but an admission, a James Bond–villain–esque monologue he’s been delivering to a comatose Elsbeth in a hospital bed at home. The montage that follows explains all of Oliver’s lies and misdeeds: sabotaging Felix’s bike to arrange their meet-cute; faking being broke to get Felix to feel sorry for him; framing Farleigh for trying to secretly sell Catton heirlooms so Sir James would cut him off financially; poisoning Felix; either convincing Venetia to kill herself or actually drugging and killing her; causing Sir James’s death from the grief; engineering his run-in with Elsbeth at her new local coffee shop; and wooing Elsbeth and causing whatever medical condition from which she’s now suffering. Oliver did it all, somehow, and even has time after the murders to choreograph a dance sequence through the now-his Saltburn to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.â€
“We got there in the end, didn’t we?†he boasts to Elsbeth before pulling out her ventilator breathing tube and watching her die, and his line after the montage — “I hated all of you, and you made it so easy†— transforms Saltburn from what we thought it was (a one-to-one story of obsession and lust) into something grander, and perhaps not as effective. Switched-perspective twists, like in The Usual Suspects and Fight Club, that fill us in on “what we missed†always open up their narratives to poking and prodding because the film implies that it’s now showing you everything, when really it’s just showing you another angle of subjectivity. And revealing Oliver as a long-planning mastermind who coveted the Cattons’ wealth and the Saltburn estate from the moment he stepped onto Oxford’s campus raises questions that the film doesn’t really support within its own narrative or its characterizations. How much of Oliver’s behavior toward Felix was a performance; was it ever really love or just a ploy? Had he researched him beforehand, and how much of his plan was figured out in advance? Do we know enough about Oliver’s life before Oxford to accept that he could pull a scheme this complicated and this deadly? Saltburn is vague about a lot, and its late-breaking broadness isn’t in its favor.
Positioning Oliver as someone who knew he could worm his way to Felix’s side by exaggerating his hardships, and Felix as a condescendingly compassionate rich boy who wanted to feel good rather than do good, worked because of their dynamic’s tête-à -tête directness. Each was fooling the other, and their shared artifice was intimate. But while taking aim at every rich person and inflating Oliver’s intelligence and abilities is kind of fun, the convenience of that shift also sacrifices some of the film’s precision and undercuts its moral murkiness. Saltburn is at its most interesting when it asks us to consider who is worse: someone like Felix, for only providing charity to caricatures of the unfortunate (note how Oliver’s name is nearly Dickensian), or Oliver, who smears his perfectly acceptable life (nice house, nice parents) to strive higher. Do they actually deserve each other, because they’re both reprehensible? Do their actions cancel each other out, because each is using the other to get the kind of adoration and acceptance they crave? The film plays with these ideas through the pair’s homoeroticism, but its last few minutes pivot away from their intriguingly parasitic relationship into an ending too elaborate to support.
Fennell’s eat-the-rich ending also asks us to reconsider the film’s seemingly cutesy dialogue, like when Oliver’s abandoned classmate Norman (Ewan Mitchell) tells him that Felix won’t take him seriously unless he gets “a title and a massive fuck-off castle,†or when Farleigh sneers that Saltburn “isn’t a dream to me, it’s my house,†or when Venetia compares Oliver to a moth, “drawn to shiny things, bumping up against the window, just desperate to get in.†Those lines felt like misunderstandings of who Oliver was and what he wanted when Saltburn was purportedly about Oliver desiring Felix, but when Oliver does become the guy who wanted the house all along, they don’t seem as sharply critical anymore. Saltburn ends on the fantastically spiteful image of Oliver gazing at a shadowbox of marionettes on which he’s placed stones decorated with the names of the Cattons, a family tradition he’s now repurposed to celebrate the end of the very same family. The misdirection Saltburn uses to get there, though, is too much pulling of strings.
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