Writer and Director: Emerald Fennell
Opening the BFI London Film Festival 2023, Emerald Fennell’s second film Saltburn is a very different prospect to last year’s family favourite Matilda. Fennell’s movie is a curious and tonally engaging story of class difference, male friendship and the bitterness of exclusion set partly at the University of Oxford and partly during an intoxicating summer at a country pile. Mixing elements of Laura Wade’s Posh – adapted for the screen as The Riot Club – Brideshead Revisited, Kind Hearts and Coronets and more than a little Yorgos Lanthimos, Saltburn merges concepts of aristocratic privilege and festering social resentment.
A loner at university as a working-class boy from Merseyside, Oliver is drawn to the confident and well-liked Felix, and soon contrives a meeting. Given access to a rarified circle, Oliver is invited to Saltburn for an indefinite summer stay where he ingratiates himself into the family. But as the weeks wear on, the atmosphere in the house changes, leaving Oliver in a delicate position as he fights to maintain his position and his consuming friendship.
Fennell’s movie begins with a lengthy preamble set at Oxford, a crucial scene and context-setter for Oliver to learn the various expectations of behaviour and manners that shape his ability to fully assimilate. The definition of character is particularly strong, placing Oliver permanently on the outside, ever reflective of his class, background and restricted economic circumstances but also by a withdrawn personality that gives few but intense friendships. It also establishes an important pattern in the film in which Oliver repeatedly overhears things about himself, building a low-level hurt and frustration that affect his increasingly disconcerting behaviour at Saltburn itself.
Often a very funny film, Fennell pokes fun at the easy mindlessness of Felix and his family, giving than a marginally exaggerated acting style that echoes Lanthimos to create plenty of laughs. But it also makes it quite difficult to be sure who the real monsters are, and Fennell controls the satirical tone just enough to leave the audience wondering whether Oliver or the Saltburn residents are the biggest social danger. As a result, this is a story that, while arguably overlong, divides into a fairly neat beginning, middle and end structure. If the end is perhaps easy to guess, there is plenty to relish along the way.
Not least another remarkable central performance from Barry Keoghan in a rare but entirely deserved leading role. Keoghan has specialised in being a disconcerting presence (and is also a Lanthimos veteran), certainly channeling some of that here. But the presentation of Oliver’s motives is restrained and deeply complex with an enjoyable, even charismatic underdog sympathy generated through the performance. Oliver is hard to like, obsessed with physicality in a slightly chilling way and is a mass of complicated emotional and bodily responses; odd certainly, but very compelling.
There is rich support from Jacob Elordi as Felix, Richard E. Grant as father James, Rosmund Pike as the blank but sharp Elspeth and Alison Oliver as daughter Venetia who present a faintly ludicrous family who are hospitable and kind but equally appalling, requiring good breeding and preservation of the status quo above all things. Archie Madekwe as cousin Farleigh offers another interpretation of bitterness as a poorer relation resentful of Oliver’s presence and the challenge he poses to his own secure position.
Saltburn has a number of wonderful set pieces, from the candlelit dining hall of the students’ Oxford College to the slovenly sunlit heat of the Saltburn gardens and the wild party for Oliver’s birthday that celebrate colour and light, with Linus Sandgren’s cinematography especially notable. An intriguing and ultimately delicious second feature from Emerald Fennell, Saltburn’s assault on irresponsible but seductive privilege speaks to our times and certainly enjoys wielding the dagger.
Saltburn is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
