When British actress, filmmaker, writer Emerald Fennell puts her name to a project, the viewer can be pretty sure of its production quality and intelligence… and sometimes its eccentricities. Her film and TV creations include Promising Young Woman for which she won an Oscar, seven episodes of The Crown and six episodes of Killing Eve. Her acting credits include Call the Midwife, the role of Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown, and Midge in Barbie.
Her latest project recently has been shown in theaters and is included with Amazon Prime on Prime Video. In so many ways, the weirdness of Saltburn makes Killing Eve look tame. Saltburn starts out as a drama about Oliver Quick, a plain-faced, friendless student at Oxford University in the early 2000s. In the early scenes, the plot is drab. Oliver attaches himself to Felix Catton, a wealthy young man whose kindness is only exceeded by his extreme good looks. They are in the same college; they go to the pub. Blah blah. Then Felix invites Oliver, now called Ollie, to spend the summer at Saltburn, the family’s super posh estate.
Then on, it’s an Ollie we have not yet seen. As the summer moves along, events at Saltburn become peculiar, even bizarre. Ollie’s first sexual encounter with Felix’s sister surpasses vampirish. He begins to exhibit a personality we haven’t seen. He’s a conniver, a pretender, sometimes a sufferer. With his despicable ways, he becomes a controller.
Saltburn offers a number of themes. Love and attachments, pretenses and deceits, friendship, hero worship, jealousy….
Many viewers are enthralled with Saltburn; others are offended and even appalled. Fennell injects scenes of nudity and sex and violence that are not to be found in other films with such imagination. This is a dark film, an adult film. In fact, it is an adult film that many adults will choose to give a pass.
Barry Keoghan, who plays Ollie, is a Dublin-born actor who has played in The Banshees of Inisherin and Dunkirk. At thirty-one, he is older than he plays in Saltburn, but he gets away with the age variance. If you make it to the film’s final sequence, you will see a shocking, eerie, and strangely powerful Ollie, one so brash that many actors would refuse to play.
The cast of Saltburn is impressive. Richard E. Grant, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, and Dorothy Atkinson. Jacob Elordi is just right as kind-hearted and beautiful Felix.
So… being that this is not a film for the squeamish, if viewers do decide to start watching, hopefully do not give up too early. The strengths of this movie are revealed in the second half, although so are the alarming scenes. Still, if you do give up early on, at least enjoy the skillful production qualities, especially the set design and lighting. Just as it was with Killing Eve, Fennell’s work isn’t for all. For the more stout-hearted, Saltburn is a cinematic treat.
Audrey Kupferberg is a film and video archivist and retired appraiser. She is lecturer emeritus and the former director of Film Studies at the University at Albany and co-authored several entertainment biographies with her late husband and creative partner, Rob Edelman.
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