Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

SPOILERS (but gawd, who could possibly care?)

Let's get the paltry good out of the way first. I admired Fennell's Promising Young Woman from 2020 so I had mild hope for Saltburn. Indeed, many of the performances were top-notch (if you care about such things). A few of the vicious one-liners were funny although I never laughed out loud once and wonder about the performative nature of the laughter to which lovers of this film have confessed. The score was intermittently arresting. And the final scene, solely for the long-take display of Barry Keoghan's naked body, promises love-cannon fodder for ages. Beyond that, Saltburn is one of the least promising films of 2023. 

Boosters cite De Palma and giallo in hyping Saltburn, a good shorthand for what I hated about it given that I'm blind to the dubious charms of Carrie and Suspiria. This means we're in Style Over Substance territory here and we're not supposed to question character motivations or address glaring plot holes. But as with De Palma and Argento, Fennell’s sense of style is too half-assed to compensate. A red dining room here, a bacchanalian party there, and plenty of beautiful flesh in between are not enough to paper over the thin story. Why bother with story at all? Why not empty your characters of humanity and transform them into goal-disoriented nodes of pleasure as Cronenberg did in Crash? Why not amp the style beyond the teleological as in, oh, The Color of Pomegranates?

To the extent that Saltburn is a horror film, I hate it too. As with Jason and Michael and Freddie after the first films in the franchises, what does Oliver Quick (Keoghan) want? Fennell gives us so little backstory to chew on that Oliver remains a pug-beautiful cipher. He’s a middle-class lad who wants the good life. So he kills an entire damn wealthy family and dances naked in the palatial estate he has dastardly inherited from them and…that’s the end point of this goal-oriented story? This is what he was truly working towards with reportedly clever flashbacks to show how he pulled off all this mayhem? He seems happy gyrating to the eye-rollingly corny “Murder on the Dance Floor.” But it’s difficult to know for sure that his desire has been satiated given the character’s cardboard construction. What is he going to do tomorrow? Even as a critique of capitalism’s tendency to create arrivistes seething with envy, it’s toothless, weak-minded satire. And I’m not supposed to care about or even mention American cousin Farleigh’s (Archie Madekwe) reaction to his extended family being slaughtered so I’ll bow out here.

Grade: D