Saltburn (15)

Working class Liverpudlian student Oliver Quick is a socially awkward square peg in the polished round hole of Oxford University, where wealth and privilege are flaunted and outsiders like Oliver are rudely dismissed without a chance to prove their worth. A random act of kindness lavished on dashing aristocrat Felix Catton grants Oliver access to rarefied circles, much to the chagrin of Felix's spiteful cousin Farleigh Start.

LondonNet Film Review

Saltburn (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Oscar-winning writer-director Emerald Fennell trades the toxic masculinity and gender warfare of her incendiary debut feature, Promising Young Woman starring Carey Mulligan, for a scabrous study of murderous obsession which takes narrative cues from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith. The Slightly Less Talented Mr Ripley would be a fitting title for this disarming thriller of green-eyed yearning and manipulation across the class divide, setting thoroughly unlikeable characters adrift on homoerotic undercurrents that threaten to pull even the strongest swimmer under…

Mulligan causes another commotion for Fennell, this time as an eccentric houseguest who has outstayed her welcome, but the picture is commanded by Barry Keoghan as a cuckoo in the nest, who devours unsuspecting prey with gusto (“You ate him right up and licked the plate!”). He relishes the character’s violent mood swings and fully embraces the script’s wild, macabre excesses including a queasy moment in an emptying bathtub and a full-frontal naked boogie to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Murder On The Dancefloor (a rather literal soundtrack choice to the mounting carnage). Dramatic meat falls off Saltburn’s bones too easily in an overcooked third act, heavily seasoned with shock value.

Working class Liverpudlian student Oliver Quick (Keoghan) is a socially awkward square peg in the polished round hole of Oxford University, where wealth and privilege are flaunted and outsiders like Oliver are rudely dismissed without a chance to prove their worth. “He’s a scholarship boy who buys his clothes from Oxfam,” sneers one well-to-do classmate. A random act of kindness lavished on dashing aristocrat Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) grants Oliver access to rarefied circles, much to the chagrin of Felix’s spiteful cousin Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe). Farleigh repeatedly goes cap in hand to Felix’s father Sir James Catton (Richard E Grant) and resents his cousin’s burgeoning friendship with a “Norman No Mates” like Oliver.

Tensions come to a head when Oliver is invited to spend the summer at the Catton family’s sprawling country estate in the company of Felix’s haughty mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), emotionally brittle sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) and a family friend known as “poor dear Pamela” (Mulligan). Pamela ignores polite hints to leave while Oliver ingratiates himself with his hosts and witnesses their withering assessment of the whirling social set including one unexpected death in the family. “She’d do anything for attention!” snarls Elspeth ungenerously.

Saltburn eats the rich but leaves us feeling peckish. Fennell’s mastery of pithy one-liners is undiminished and she distributes them evenly among the ensemble cast, particularly in fraught scenes of grotesque familial dysfunction. She tightly layers misery atop misfortune to the point of absurdity but her cast, led ferociously by Keoghan, gamely plays along.

– Sarah Lee