'Saltburn' – frame.review
Emerald Fennell's sophomore feature is another cotton candy nightmare about the corrupting power of desire.
Saltburn
Emerald Fennell, director
127M
Following up on her 2020 debut feature, Promising Young Woman, which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar – Emerald Fennell’s sophomore feature, Saltburn, brings what has become the director’s signature bubblegum aesthetic to an acidic story that hits closer to home.
Saltburn is a cotton-candy-clad puppet show about the ‘eat the rich’ mentality and the infinitely corrupting power of desire. Set against the backdrop of the early millennium, anachronistic as it may be, gives Saltburn a contrasting quality to the tales it’s aping. Steeping the viewer into a time of indie pop sleaze, wearing your best business casual clothing in the club, and your Juicy Couture tracksuits .. well anywhere that wasn’t the club.
That’s where we find ourselves in as we drop into the life of Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a scholarship-backed freshman at Oxford. When we meet Oliver it’s clear he strives to showcase his brilliance, but that comes with his rampant lack of ‘chat’ (for those not caught up on Love Island vocab lessons - he’s socially inept). As Oliver walks through the campus, the towering presence of Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) looms larger than any grand, historic building.
Oliver and Felix start to bond through a back-and-forth series of helping each other out of jams. Oliver lends Felix his bike to make a meeting. Felix spots Oliver a £20 note to buy drinks for the ‘cool’ kids. While undoubtedly acts of opportunity and charity, they more serve as signals of friendship. As time passes their friendship becomes deep as Oliver shares his story with Felix – a tale of an absentee parent, and a family life marred by addiction and instability.
Once the semester is over, moved by the strife Oliver faces returning home, Felix invites his friend to stay with him at his family’s country home, the titular Saltburn, for the summer. From there the opulent palace becomes the backdrop for the perverse evolution of Oliver’s obsession with the Catton clan. The family matriarch, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), her dawdling husband, James (Richard E. Grant) the suffering sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver), and the distant American cousin, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) - ohh and the addition of family-friend ‘Poor Dear’ Pamela (Carey Mulligan) rounds out the cast.
From there we descend into their world of high-class revelry that derives humor and disgust at the circumstances of living as an elite, but not disdain. Moments like Felix giving a tour through the home describing priceless centuries-old artifacts with a lackadaisical tone as if they were the latest Wayfair delivery. Montages of the family swinging tennis rackets draped in their dinner jackets and swigging straight from the bottle of champagne. They serve not to pillory the Catton’s, but ingratiate the audience into their specific blend of the 1% lifestyle.
In all the debaucherous summer we once again find Oliver, who Keoghan plays with a focused hunger in his eyes and on his lips. When he leers at Felix masturbating in the tub of their shared bathroom - he licks the tub clean. He lures the “sexually incontinent” Venetia in with a smile and a finger or two. As with most of his roles, Keoghan is intensely watchable, shiver down the spin inducing both awe and confusion at his commitment. But as the story finds its final form, his motivations eventually reveal him as the puppet master come to realize the Cattons’ worst fears. It continues to ramp up through the jealousy, anger, and admiration - until the last frames where Felix can shed all of his well-crafted artifice and take an exuberant victory lap.
Ultimately, Fennell wanted to make a movie about how legacy and wealth reduce both those with and those without are both susceptible to manipulation in the face of desire. Who is controlling your strings? Which version is taking the stage? While not new, those are always interesting questions to ask. In her great commitment to her settings and production design, Fennell actually starts to hit the visual motifs a bit too directly.
The marionettes come through both through an actual prop, but we see in many moments that it takes the physical use of handiwork to take control of another person, whether for pleasure, restraint, or intimidation - and sometimes a mixture. Mixing with the puppetry is a heavy-handed infusion of Greek myth - labyrinths, centaurs, and Icarus imagery - are things that attempt to be subtext to the story, but just really don’t serve the plot in a meaningful way.
The idea of being a shape-shifter and manipulator is shown through that old staple of cinema –– light refraction. While interesting to look at, there are no new insights added to seeing multiple angles of Keoghan looking back at themselves in the bathroom mirror .. or shattering one that matter.
The use of sex as a manner of seduction of the whole person hones in less on anything intimate or romantic but revels in the sweat, spit, semen, and menstrual blood. Using the camera to show us the effort of sexuality with none of the pleasure.
It is understandable that Fennell wants to show tricks and style that she has evolved with. Unfortunately for her, all these tropes are run ragged in the genre and this has little new to say.
Saltburn is far less risk-taking than Promising Young Woman. That is not a bad thing in the least - because it was clear that Fennell felt more comfortable in this world. The bad thing is that it just left me wanting. The whole of the production design - the setting, camera, costuming - are opulent and sequin-laden, but feel shallow. There are storytelling decisions that disregard the audience’s intelligence. The visual metaphors are sledgehammered into you at every turn imaginable. The use of flashbacks in the final moment actually answers too much when it would have been more fun to discuss and deduce.
While I think there are filmmaking choices that leave a lot to be desired about Saltburn, at its core it’s an intriguing, erotic, sequin discoteche put on the biggest screen imaginable and that’ll never be a bad thing.