Saltburn, writer/director Emerald Fennel's second feature following her razor-sharp 2021 Oscar-winning debut Promising Young Woman, is an intoxicating, intense and exhilarating ride through the upper echelons of British high society, underpinned by bravura performances from the delightfully well-chosen cast.
The reliably excellent, unstoppably magnetic Barry Keoghan, last seen on the big screen in his Oscar-nominated role in Martin McDonagh’s pitch black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, is given his first leading role here. It’s fair to say he doesn’t hold back.
He plays Oliver Quick, a swotty, working class fresher student who has secured a scholarship to Oxford University in 2006 and finds himself utterly out of his depth among the upper crust youths that are now his peers. A chance encounter brings him into the orbit of Felix (Jacob Elordi), the impossibly handsome and privileged heir to his family's sprawling estate, Saltburn.
Felix, casually charming and devastatingly fickle, is moved by Oliver’s sad tales of his grim family background and takes him under his wing, inviting him to his gargantuan manor for the summer and flinging open the door to a life of carefree excess.
Here, Oliver meets Venetia, Felix’s beautiful, troubled sister (Alison Oliver), his psychotically detached from reality parents Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) and Sir James (Richard E. Grant) and his sceptical cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). When Felix begins to tire of his new plaything, the female members of his family begin to take more of a keen interest.
While Saltburn for the most part tips along at a languid pace, luxuriating in the amusing awfulness of these characters and painting a lurid fantasy of the empty lives of the uber wealthy, there is an abrupt and somewhat whiplash-like gear change for the last act. It becomes increasingly unhinged as it rushes towards its conclusion.
Despite this abrupt, discombobulating tone change, Saltburn’s script, peppered with laugh out loud one-liners, and give-it-your-all performances, make it eminently entertaining. Keoghan is startingly good as Oliver, consistently getting under your skin as he slowly reveals himself, flipping between tortured innocence to perverse malignance in a heartbeat. You can imagine no one else in the role.
Rosamund Pike also deserves top marks for her perfectly deadpan, vacant performance that is imbued with a shimmering layer of sadness. Richard E Grant brings another level of demented battiness to the proceedings as her hapless husband and looks like he’s having the time of his life while doing so.
Meanwhile, Carey Mulligan has a scene-stealing extended cameo as a limpet-like but ravenously chic house guest who has well and truly overstayed her welcome.
The nostalgic mid-noughties soundtrack, featuring the likes of The Killers, MGMT and The xx, adds to the chaotic fun. Saltburn is a deliciously dark and deranged Gothic thriller that isn't afraid to lean into its remarkable weirdness.
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