SALTBURN

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn did something nearly every other 2023 movie could not: Start an argument. Released into award season as a tawdry kind of counterprogramming against more serious fare, the movie provided a big bad jolt of decadent fun at a time when such things are hard to come by. Oxford scholarship student Oliver (Barry Keoghan), earnest and doe-eyed but also a bit of a drip, insinuates himself into a circle of glamorous and staggeringly wealthy students at least in part to stay closer to Felix, an upper-class heartthrob who has caught his eye (Jacob Elordi). Once ensconced on Felix’s family estate of Saltburn, Oliver moves past romantic obsession to something more primal.
Because of this, people got excited. They thrilled to the luscious and vaguely rotted environment, not to mention the music, strobing cinematography, faded aristocrats whistling past their graves, the gritty eroticism brought by Keoghan and Elordi, and a dash of necrophilia; it’s the kind of movie meant to launch a hundred Cinema Studies essays about “the gaze.” The movie’s boosters did not care too much or at all about how tightly the plot threads were knitted up in the all-too-much-of-that conclusion. They got on board and enjoyed the ride.
Because of that, others were irritated. Saltburn was accused of being less than the sum of its parts. It was fileted for being too derivative, too explanatory in a Bond villain way, too ambiguous about where its protagonist was on the sexuality spectrum, and refusing to deliver moral clarity about who the goodies and baddies were. But while Fennell’s satire of the toffs is constant and cutting, she never loses sight of their humanity.
Saying too much more would give away the twists and turns. Saltburn’s critics are not wrong when they cut it up for being both nonsensical and just too damn much at the end. Saltburn is a great time produced by a great director without being a great movie. And that is perfectly okay.