The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way.
The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on sufferance. Without Felix realising he’s being gamed, he invites Oliver to stay for the summer holidays at the family pile, Saltburn.
Here, a convoluted game plays out, of high-class oneupmanship versus low working-class cunning – Oliver may not be as beautiful as Felix but he’s cleverer than most – and over the summer he worms his way into the affections of his aristocratic hosts.
Are we watching a version of The Servant, Joseph Losey’s take on the upstairs/downstairs psychodrama? Emerald Fennell – writer, director, producer – gets most of her fun by refusing to let on what she’s up to. Early in the film Felix tells Oliver that his family was used by Evelyn Waugh as a template in one of his novels (Brideshead Revisited in all likelihood). But in her depiction of cobwebby family relations Fennell also nods to Agatha Christie’s country house crime thrillers, the camp gothic of Entertaining Mister Sloane and the fruity gargoyles of Vivian Stanshall’s Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.
There’s going to be a murder, in other words, as well as plenty of people behaving outrageously, some jolly japes, a few jokes and gorgeous people in states of undress.
This is a particularly well cast movie. Jacob Elordi’s long limbs and lean physique make him the perfect Felix – the man who can have any woman (or man, if he so desires). Barry Keoghan morphs in tiny increments from lumpen Merseysider Oliver into something more worldly and sophisticated without ever leaving behind the sense that here’s a man who’s eaten a lot of potatoes. Rosamund Pike is particularly brilliant (and particularly well dressed – by Sophie Canale) as Felix’s sexy mother and Fennell gives her some of the film’s best lines – “I was a lesbian for a while, you know,” she tells Oliver. “But it was all too wet for me. Men are so lovely and dry.” Slurps cocktail.
Richard E Grant is also excellent as Felix’s father, daffy until the chips are down and then suddenly flinty… this is how the upper classes hang on to what they’ve got. Archie Madekwe as Felix’s cousin, his to-the-manner-born attitude even more irksome than Felix’s, and Alison Oliver is also great as Felix’s sexually incontinent sister. Carey Mulligan, high in the billing, does little more than an extended cameo as the gaudy but dull relation Pamela (or “Poor Dear Pamela” as she’s listed on the IMDb).
The film seems to have disappointed those hoping for a re-run of 2020’s more zeitgeisty Promising Young Woman, which won Fennell an Oscar, but this is in effect a re-run of the same idea – revenge as a dish best served cold – done more as a dark farce this time round.
But take it as it’s intended, as a lark, and it is very satisfying and highly entertaining. These superbly entitled people, the gorgeous house, shot ravishingly by Linus Sandgren (of La La Land, Babylon and No Time to Die), and a soundtrack that captures that post-Britpop era (Arcade Fire, Girls Aloud, Bloc Party). And yet, beneath it all the nagging question remains – we can see what’s in this relationship for Oliver, but what’s in it for Felix, the man who can have anything? Fennell leaves that as a blank to be filled in.
Saltburn – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
