Saltburn: A messy, posho melodrama that for better or worse makes you feel 14 again

Emerald Fennell’s hedonistic second film is sometimes thrilling, often cringe

5 months ago

I was 10 when Skins started on E4 in January 2007. Safe to say, a bit too young. I’d listen to my older sisters talk about it, obsessing over the sex, the partying, the heartbreak, the wild and uninhibited lives of horny teenagers drinking too much. One night, they let me watch an episode. I felt so grown up. It felt so cinematic, so intense – like the coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life. When you grow up and you have that nostalgic craving to go back and watch an episode of something like Skins, or anything aimed at British young people in the late 00s, it’s safe to say it’s never quite on the pedestal you once placed it on. Watching Saltburn, the second film from Academy Award winning director Emerald Fennell, feels exactly like that – for better and for worse.

Saltburn whisks us into the world of the University of Oxford in 2006, anchoring us to Oliver (Barry Keoghan – amazing, duh) as the out of place northerner in a rich boy’s world. Oliver’s instantly infatuated with Felix (Jacob Elordi), the BNOC who lets Oliver into the fold after a chance encounter where Oliver got to help Felix in a messy situation. From there, their friendship results in Felix taking Oliver home to his family’s estate, Saltburn, for the summer. Like The Overlook Hotel in The Shining, the manor of Saltburn is a character in its own right and swallows the cast whole – one by one.

With Saltburn, Emerald Fennell treats the years 2006 and 2007 like she’s making a historical period drama – and that reverence for the era is the highlight. Fennell proved with Promising Young Woman that if there’s one thing she’s going to smash into oblivion it’s a soundtrack that has audiences grinning maniacally at how delicious the songs feel on the big screen – and she continues that streak in Saltburn. If nothing else in the first half of this film wins you over, and there’s much to love, a pitch perfect inclusion of seminal festive classic Have A Cheeky Christmas by (in an ideal world) Grammy winning music icons The Cheeky Girls.

It’s also, admittedly, beautiful. Emerald Fennell shoots Saltburn on location in Oxford, and nothing else would have sufficed to so fascinatingly film without limits on the historical campus. Fennell said some students “kindly leant” her their actual dorm rooms, and that authenticity – a weird mix of opulence and uni squalor – makes the film all the better. Saltburn estate is actually Drayton House. It’s never been used for filming before, and that unfamiliarity of never seeing such an impressive building on screen makes arriving with Oliver all the more thrilling.

Despite a great turn from Rosamund Pike as Felix’s mother, always playing Lady Elsbeth as a woman treading the board between warm and inviting and truly insane, it’s Saltburn’s descent into its final act where it fully loses its way. The final half hour of this film is self destructive and ruins the great work Fennell and her cast do in the first half. In Saltburn’s final moments, Fennell chooses to go for lazy twists and reveals that undermine the gorgeous direction of the first. It’s shot in 4:3, and the entire thing is beautiful. But that beauty feels thrown away for the sake of cheap twists. It’s a real shame.

Instead of climaxing on the brewing sexual tensions of youth, class divisions and one good twist centred on Oliver around the midpoint, Saltburn ends with a whimper that makes it feel like the end of one of the least good episodes of Inside No 9 (coincidentally, Reece Shearsmith stars in a small role). Where Promising Young Woman sticks the landing on all fronts for me, a moving and hilarious modern classic that is as devastating as it is thrilling – Saltburn amps up the shock value set pieces and tries too hard in moments that cheapen it from the romp it almost could have been.

Still, no one can deny Emerald Fennell, for all her nepo baby faults, is one of the most exciting voices in film – and whilst Saltburn is hardly a sophomore slump, it finishes uninspired.