Saltburn is a cute and quirky and weird new thriller that opened in the UK last week and in the U.S. in limited release a day before Thanksgiving.
I assumed that “saltburn” was the name of a novel from which it was adapted, but it’s an original script the very talented British writer/actor Emerald Fennell (whose writing credits include Barbie and Killing Eve), and Saltburn is the name of the inherited estate of an aristocratic couple, a mentally ill Lord Catton (played by Richard Grant) and Lady Catton, an airheaded former model (Rosamund Pike). The Catton family includes two children, Felix (Jacob Elordi) and Venetia. The family entertains a constant stream of hangers-on who are financially dependent on the Cattons, while the Cattons are in turn dependent on their hanger-ons for purpose and revivification. The hangers-on include a drug addicted mistress of a dangerous Russian billionaire and a catty biracial American cousin whose own parents are fallen on somewhat hard times. Interestingly salt is what you use to burn slugs and snails, dehydrating them. And it’s also what you use to form a magic circle to keep out demons.
Unfortunately for the Cattons, one of the cardinal rules in keeping safe from demons, vampires, etc. is that you not invite them in. But the Cattons need to invite in a constant stream of new people, as sister Venetia says at one point of her brother’s new friend Oliver Quick (Irish actor Barry Keoghan) “you’re this year’s toy.” (Margot Robbie, fresh off of her role as Barbie, is a producer for Saltburn.)
Oliver and Felix are freshmen at Oxford (Fennell’s alma mater). Felix is there perhaps only because he is from an aristocratic family. Oliver is the equivalent of a national merit scholar, a kid with perfect grades and SAT scores. In an early scene where he meets with his advisor he casually says that he read all 50 of the books Oxford had suggested to incoming freshman as summer reading. The advisor is shocked and admits he has never read some of these books. (The advisor exclaims that the Bible was on the list - “You read the whole Bible in one summer?!” - and Saltburn does get rather Old Testamenty,) Oliver says he thought it was mandatory.
Unfortunately, being a brilliant student does not get Oliver social acceptance. In another early scene the only person who will speak to him in the dining hall is a mentally unstable math savant.
It turns out Oliver is a savant as well, and he quickly realizes that he will be more interesting to the young aristocrats if, instead of being a middle or upper middle class boy who is smarter than they are, he is the poverty stricken child of drug addicts who still managed somehow to get into Oxford. (Coincidentally, this is actually closer to actor Keoghan’s own life, having spent years in foster care as a child.) Oliver, who is either gay or bisexual, falls in love with Felix (and since Australian actor Jacob Elordi is 6’5” of male pulchritude, with both dimples and a cleft chin, Fennell’s tale requires no suspension of disbelief.)
All of the Oxford students, and all of the Saltburn estate guests and residents, are big drinkers, drug users, sluts, even sex addicts. Their idea of an entertaining social event is cocaine, vodka, and karaoke, far from the dinners and waltzes of Jane Austen. A good portion of the younger guests all seem very sexually fluid. Perhaps that’s why it’s easy for someone like Oliver to trick them, and so he too ends up invited inside to Saltburn, as a friend and “toy,” if not a bedmate, for Felix, his guest for the summer.
At this point Fennell could have written a deeper story about the degeneracy of the Western ruling class, whose ideal is to dress and act like a Kardashian and be worshiped for this, and how that opens them up to inimical forces. That’s not what she does. What she does is less interesting though still interesting - she mines the British tradition of gothic horror literature and fuses it with a retelling of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Saltburn, and Oliver, and lots of other characters, all become very creepy. Though one writer she seems to be mining is not an Oxford but a Cambridge academic, M.R. James (1862-1936) (whose plots and notions are often used by Stephen King and other horror writers). It’s actually good a lot of scenes happen in fog or darkness, helping the audience believe actor Barry Keoghan (who is 31) is the 19 year old Oliver Quick - in well lit close ups his face and eyes make it clear he is no longer even in his mid-twenties.
Creepy scenes include the Saltburn estate maze, at the center of which is a statute of a Minotaur, like the original Cretian labyrinth. As in the M.R. James tale about an inherited estate, the maze proves lethal. As in many M.R. James (and other horror) stories, a ghostly figure keeps lurking outside windows at night, on the vast lawns surrounding Saltburn. The figure turns out just to be nymphomaniacal sister Venetia in diaphanous white bed clothes, hoping to lure a house guest into sex. She eventually lures Oliver (or is he manipulating her?) even though he seems to be in love with her brother - in one scene he spies on Felix masturbating in the giant bathtub in their shared bathroom, and then, after Felix goes to bed, sticks his face in the bathwater, drinks it, and then performs a rim job on the drain. Pulling off Venetia’s underwear and fingering her and moving to eat her out, she protests that it is the wrong time of the month. To which Oliver replies by licking her menstrual blood off his fingers, then putting his fingers in her mouth, and, before beginning cunninglingus, offering “I am a vampire!”
It seems to be the season for sex gone creepy. The new Showtime series Fellow Travelers about gays being persecuted by Joe McCarthy, is giving viewers a lot of kink, including toe sucking, foot licking, anal intercourse, toilet sex, and bondage. Another Showtime series, The Curse, joins Fellow Travelers in giving us a lot of full frontal male nudity. Saltburn has them both beat, although apparently in both cases scenes improvised by actor Barry Keoghan, who seems happy to show his stacked muscular little body (he’s 5’8”) and his rather large (when flaccid!) penis. In one scene post funeral, he has coitus with the loose dirt over a grave. In another he dances naked throughout an entire house, celebrating the death of someone he believes did him wrong. I suspect writer/director Emerald Fennell, whose ouevre includes female assassins and agents of vengeance (Killing Eve, Promising Young Woman) approves of male nudity as a way of evening the score between men and women in movie sexploitation.
Saltburn is not the meaningful movie it could have been, but instead a curiosity and more intellectual and less viscerally gruesome than your usual horror movie. Given Ms. Fennell’s obvious talents and the recent DEI push at Marvel Studios that led to their recent box office flop The Marvels, it would be interesting to see what Fennell would do with an vengeful villain who has to be stopped by Marvel superheros.
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One of the best reviews of Saltburn is found on the Instagram of comic George Lewis.
A shorter version of this was published yesterday at SpliceToday.