Time: 131 Minutes
Age Rating: R16 – Drug use, suicide, sex scenes & offensive language
Cast:
Barry Keoghan as Oliver Quick
Jacob Elordi as Felix Catton
Rosamund Pike as Lady Elspeth Catton
Richard E. Grant as Sir James Catton
Alison Oliver as Venetia Catton
Archie Madekwe as Farleigh Start
Carey Mulligan as “Poor Dear” Pamela
Director: Emerald Fennell

I really wasn’t sure how I was going to find Saltburn. While I really liked writer and director Emerald Fennell’s last movie Promising Young Woman, after sitting on it a bit and hearing other reactions, I think I’ll need to rewatch it to be sure about my thoughts on it. Her newest film Saltburn looked good from the trailer, but the very wide range of reactions had me unsure, it’s probably one of the more divisive movies from this year. Perhaps my lowered expectations is why I ended up somewhat enjoying Saltburn.

Generally, Saltburn is an entertaining comedic thriller and there’s fun to be had with it, though the movie is full of issues. The characters are unfortunately pretty thin and don’t have much depth to them, some are more archetypes and cartoons than actual characters, and others are confusingly written. At around the halfway point of the movie, there is a very clear shift after a particular revelation. Despite knowing the twist before watching, I thought that it worked and it changed the way that the movie played. From that point though, it all began to go downhill. The movie becomes pretty predictable and stops being suspenseful as you know how the rest of it is going to play out. The attempts at further twists fall flat, and with every subsequent revelation, the movie unravels and becomes considerably worse. Saltburn is also a pretty shallow movie, with not much substance or anything that could be called thought provoking. The setup of the movie makes it look like it would be a satire on the rich, and it certainly has the absurdity needed for a satire, but it doesn’t appear to be saying anything at all. Something I had been hearing leading up to watching Saltburn was that it was against the poor. I do have a defense for this, admittedly a backhanded one: I don’t think that Saltburn is smart enough to be intentionally classist, or even count as a satire. There isn’t any actual commentary on class structure here. The only message I could extract was that people are attracted to rich things and rich people. The movie didn’t need to be something particularly rich in substance, but it nonetheless felt a little empty by the end, so I was just hoping for something more.

Many of the early reactions to Saltburn were talking about how ‘provocative’ it is. However, the movie is only provocative in the sense that you can tell that it’s clearly trying to provoke a reaction from you. I admit that before watching, I already knew of a few infamous moments that were gaining notability online (one involving a bathtub). However, my conclusion after watching the movie was that 90% of the shock factor was not knowing that those scenes were coming. Despite how they sounded on paper, they just didn’t really have the shock factor that Fennell was going for, mainly due to the handling and direction of those scenes. Saltburn doesn’t actually commit to the debauchery, and just relies on individual empty shock scenes which end up being a detriment to the story and characters if anything. Also, while it’s not the biggest problem of the movie, some of the self satisfied nature of the movie does make some of its negatives feel even worse, especially with the ending.

There is a good cast involved, as said before a lot of the characters are cartoonish and have thin characterisation. But the actors do their best. Barry Keoghan is good in the lead role, which is impressive considering the major issues in the writing of his character. His performance felt very inconsistent due to all the revelations and twists, and his character’s motivations are all over the place. Still, Keoghan is still very committed to his part, and he helps to slowly reveal more of his character as the story progresses. Jacob Elordi, Archie Madekwe and Alison Oliver are also good, while Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant were the standouts. To Elordi’s credit, his character was the only one in this movie that felt like an actual person. Pike is on the other end of the spectrum and was on the cartoonish side, but is good in that part and was very entertaining in her scenes.

Despite what I think about her writing, Emerald Fennell’s direction is good, and on a technical level I do think it’s a step up from Promising Young Woman. It is visually stunning, helped by Linus Sandgren’s beautiful cinematography, and the lighting and production design were good.

Saltburn is a stylish, entertaining, visually stunning thriller with great performances, though it’s held back by the substanceless and mixed bag of a script, and it particularly loses itself in the second half. It definitely has some good parts to it and it was better than I was expecting it to be. However, when considering all of its issues, I’m not sure that it’s an easy film to recommend.