Movie Review: ‘Saltburn’ is a Masterful and Wicked Dark Comedy

Rating: 95/100

Writer and director Emerald Fennell first made a name for herself as the showrunner of BBC crime thriller series Killing Eve, but she struck gold in 2020 with her mesmerizing rape revenge flick Promising Young Woman. That film, which she wrote and directed, earned Fennell an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Fennell now returns for her second feature film, Saltburn, which she once again wrote and directed.

The film follows Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a student at Oxford University who got in on a scholarship and struggles to fit in with his classmates because of his social awkwardness and financial situation. That is until he meets Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a more popular and wealthy student at the University, who becomes Oliver’s new best friend. After Oliver tells Felix that he found out his father has died, Felix invites Oliver to his family’s massive estate, Saltburn, to spend the summer. Oliver finds himself so obsessed with his new friend and his home that he’ll do whatever is necessary to stay in Felix’s orbit, even lying, cheating, stealing, and manipulating to achieve his goal. This sets him down a sinister path that is only destined to lead to tragedy.

Keoghan puts on a masterful performance, playing a believable bumpkin and, once he starts to become more manipulative, a seductive narcissist. His relationship with Felix blurs the line between platonic and romantic/sexual, with the film starting out with an interview where Oliver discusses whether or not he was in love with Felix, leaving the question largely unanswered until the end of the film. While Felix and Oscar both spend a good amount of the movie chasing women, there’s some homoerotic elements to their relationship that seem more like supertext than subtext. Nor is Felix the only member of the same gender that Oliver finds himself getting intimate with. Sexuality is pretty fluid in this film, with words like “gay” or “straight” never really entering into the conversation.

Sex scenes in this film always seem to take place in the dark, allowing for some really eerie cinematography as we see shadows sharing passion. But the sex scenes are also focused heavily on bodily fluids, most notably a very graphic period sex scene, making them very real and visceral but also somewhat uncomfortable, which makes sense given the context. In fact, there’s a lot about this movie that’s very uncomfortable to watch, but you find yourself forced to watch anyway because it’s so wickedly dark.

The movie leaves a lot of breadcrumbs hinting at the ending, and it’s not hard to spot the clues along the way. Still, there’s something like a gut punch when the inevitable twist comes that leaves you walking away from the theater feeling pessimistic about human nature. For all my talk in past reviews about not like cold-hearted films that seem to revel in someone’s suffering, Saltburn is a little different in that, as monumentally dark as the movie gets in the end, there’s a certain justice to the darkness that doesn’t make it feel as cold. Just as Promising Young Woman was pretty unforgiving in the way it treated rapists, Saltburn is similarly uncaring towards the plight of the wealthy. But the wealthy are also self-obsessed and cruel, so the audience is invited to share in the film’s disdain for them. Still, I did overhear more than one person who, upon exiting the theater, described the ending as “traumatizing,” and I certainly get where they’re coming from.

It does seem like Fennell has another potential hit on her hands. But, where Promising Young Woman didn’t have to worry as much about morality since the entire film was about taking revenge on rapists and their enablers, Saltburn wades into much more morally ambiguous waters. But it’s still a wildly wicked ride where you’ll find yourself, at times, feeling like you’re siding with the villain of the story. And, in some ways, that’s the whole point and part of the fun of this film. Just don’t expect to leave the theater feeling good about humanity as a whole.

Saltburn opens Tuesday in theaters nationwide.

Photo courtesy of MGM and Amazon Studios.