'Saltburn' Lets You Root for the Pervert

Barry Keoghan and Rosamund Pike lead one of the best ensemble casts of the year in 'Promising Young Woman' director Emerald Fennell's new take on Patricia Highsmith by way of Bret Easton Ellis.

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Happy Thanksgiving, #Content Lovers! Below, I wrote about a heartwarming family movie. We also have a new Frotcast out to help on those long drives. Ay, we’re doin’ public service ova heah! Okay, enjoy.

Amazon Studios/MGM

Druig Hangs Dong

Who is more depraved, the idle wealthy or the strivers desperate to become them?

This is the question at the heart of writer/director Emerald Fennell’s sophomore effort, Saltburn, a follow-up to Promising Young Woman that plays like Patricia Highsmith by way of Bret Easton Ellis. It’s an openly debauched, unabashedly literary college-set tale of wealth and horniness where some people are wealthy and others merely rich, but everyone is depraved and bisexual.

Starring Barry Keoghan*, Jacob Elordi from Euphoria, Archie Madekwe, and Richard E. Grant, it has one of the best ensemble casts of the year. Rosamund Pike probably deserves an Oscar, and Barry Keoghan finally hangs dong. Saltburn is very nearly perfect, and might be, if only the last 10 or 15 minutes hadn’t felt so desperate to be memed (which feels beneath a film that just gave us 90+ minutes of cinema).

An almost too on-the-nose mash-up of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Rules of Attraction, Barry Keoghan plays Oliver, the proverbial scholarship boy, wide eyed and new to Oxford, where the other students all seem to already have established friend groups and a personal relationship with their tailors. In his first meeting with his advisor, Oliver surprises (and kind of annoys) the mentor by having completed the entire supplemental reading list. Meanwhile, Boho American Farleigh Start (played by a British guy, Archie Madekwe, which somehow works) breezes in 10 minutes late and immediately bonds with the same instructor, who used to have a crush on Farleigh’s mom (mum?). So it goes. No one likes a try-hard.

There are a million books and movies set in the first year of college, and for good reason: it’s the time of life when personality is most malleable; a time when you feel like you could truly be anything, and yet also when the pressure to choose is most intense. Emerald Fennell’s opening tracking shot, of Oliver trying to find his dorm room on day one amongst the ancient buildings at the university (shades of Ray Liotta walking through the Copa in Goodfellas) is so effective that it gave me vicarious flop sweats, that thrilling mix of anticipation and dread, even two decades removed from my undergrad days. Who will you meet? What will you become? Will you embarrass yourself, and will sex be there?

Oliver is immediately pigeon-holed as a loser outcast by the British swells, who all went to boarding school and know how to fasten a cravat, while Oliver is stuck hanging out with a possibly unhinged math prodigy who seems more proud of his outsider status than Oliver does. Things finally start to change for Oliver when he sees Felix Catton (Elordi) stranded on the side of the road with a flat “tyre” and offers to trade him bikes.

As Felix, Elordi has all the free-wheeling charm of Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley, with the added bonus that he seems to genuinely be a pretty nice guy. Blasé and entitled, sure, but who can blame him? He’s rich. When Felix becomes the first guy to treat Oliver with any level of kindness, Oliver begins to bloom in his presence like he’s the first sunny day in spring. Is it the kindness, or the fact that Felix is a six-foot-five chin dimple sculpted from fresh butter? Why split hairs? Oliver gets a friend and crush all rolled into one (possibly no actor does sweaty-awkward-horny better than Barry Keoghan).

Is everyone in this movie bisexual? my wife asked at one point. Shut up, honey, it’s Oxford**.

Oliver eventually opens up about his tragic family life, and Felix seems to accept him, much to the chagrin of Farleigh, Felix’s cousin whose free-wheeling mother ran off to America. When summer comes and Oliver is left with no place to go, Felix exhorts him to come stay with the Catton clan at Saltburn, their “giant fuck-off castle” somewhere in the English midlands. (You know they’re old money when the house has a name).

It wouldn’t be much of a movie if Oliver didn’t go, and when he arrives, he meets the whole crew, from creepy butler Duncan (a deliciously unsettling Paul Rhys) to Felix’s gossipy parents, Elspeth and James (Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant) and slutty sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver). “The girl is sexually incontinent,” Elspeth breathily overshares. “Been that way since she was 14.”

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Fennell’s previous effort, Promising Young Woman, which was smart but felt slightly contrived and starred Carey Mulligan in the lead, one of those actors who just shits me (in Australian parlance) for reasons I can’t entirely articulate (everyone has a few, it’d be silly to deny it). Mulligan is back in Saltburn, only this time in the perfectly cast role of Pamela, an orange-haired permanent house guest of the Cattons who everyone seems to find dreadfully dull, and say so as soon as she leaves the room.

Pike, meanwhile, gets arguably her finest role and objectively all of the best lines in Saltburn. “I was lesbian for a while,” she tells Oliver. “But women were just too wet for me, you know? Men are just so lovely and dry.”

Oliver is in way over his head amongst these insane rich people, or so we think at first. Soon he’s matching them depravity for depravity, playing the game and flying his freak flag high — especially so in an early scene that feels like Fennell saw the peach scene from Call Me By Your Name and said “hold my beer.”

Fennell wouldn’t have just coyly referenced the sex peach like Guadagnino; she’d want us to be able to smell it. In fact if anything, she might lean too heavily on gross-out gags. She clearly has a bit of a punk streak, which is luckily my wheelhouse.

Probably Fennell’s most brilliant conceit in Saltburn is constructing a story about decadence that puts us in the position of rooting for its most based pervert. Keoghan, who nearly always plays the wild card, dials back his natural rascallyness in the first half and it makes for an excellent slow burn as the mask slowly comes off. And the rest of the cast is so fantastically watchable from top to bottom that it’d be compelling even if the story went nowhere.

That Saltburn actually does have something to say — about the idle wealthy and their imitators- — is a nice reveal, even after making me feel more than content to just watch an especially sumptuous version of “Oxford kids are decadent and depraved.”

If anything, Saltburn’s final ten minutes expends far too much spelling out storylines that were already obvious to anyone half paying attention. There’s already one destined-to-be-talked-about scene at a cemetary that feels like too much, then turns its own too muchness into art. Then Fennell tries to do it again five minutes later and it really is too much. Keoghan delivers what feels like what should’ve been a mic-drop line, but then Fennell tacks on a cute-but-unecessary dance sequence that feels like it really should’ve just been the blooper reel.

After giving us an almost pitch perfect Highsmith take on Rules of Attraction with hardly a sour note and the vulgarity turned up to ten, the last bit feels like a failed attempt at A24-style meme bait that Saltburn doesn’t need.

Still, the fact that the movie could’ve used a haircut mostly doesn’t tarnish what came before: a stylish, perverse, coming-of-age comedy of manners that isn’t content to let you just gawk at the debauchery without making you complicit in it.

Grade: A-

*Ireland’s National Rascal. Richard E. Grant would be a great candidate for National Rascal of the UK, except he was born and raised in Swaziland. Ben Mendelsohn is the National Rascal of Australia.

**Listen, I may not have gone to Oxford either, but I’ve read enough Bret Easton Ellis novels to know that everyone who goes to fancy college is bisexual (*fluffs cravat*). (Emerald Fennell actually did go to Oxford).