At many times Saltburn seems like someone trying to reinvent themselves during a summer holiday; delivering a fun reinvention of a rich tradition of class-satires and con-films, but coming into conflict with original about its personality. While questions around class and sexuality threaten to become interesting, the film ultimately prioritises moments of trivial humour or virality in a way that means it fails to leave much of an impact genuinely of its own.
Scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) finds himself struggling to fit in at the University of Oxford. He’s extremely well-read, almost to a fault – leaving his professor (Reece Shearsmith) comically aghast at the idea his student would consume the entire reading list – but the struggles are not academic. Oliver is a scholarship student, and in the eyes of everyone else that practically renders him a serf.
An apparently chance meeting with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, who seems to be having a better time with his accent than Keoghan) turns that on its head. A popular student from old money, when Felix takes pity on Oliver – who initially presents himself as useful by supplying him with an emergency bicycle, but turns the screw by giving insight into his turbulent life back in Merseyside – he presents the gateway to another world.
Even with this blessing, however, Oliver never wins the acceptance of Felix’s other friends, and the relationship quickly wears thin fast. Until, that is, an escalation at home sees a tearful Oliver turn up at Felix’s door with the news that his father back in Prescot – near, but not in Liverpool – has overdosed. Amid the tales of filth and addiction that follow, Keoghan’s accent reaches new levels of pantomime Scouse, and Felix’s resolve breaks again.
With summer break fast approaching, Felix invites Oliver back to Saltburn – his family’s vast country manor. But first, he takes him to a river, where he informs him of a family grieving ritual, dating back to when a great-grandfather of his lost a son in the first world war: write the name of the deceased on a stone, and just chuck it in. When Oliver approximates this, though, as he attempts to let go of the trauma, the rock lands on a small island, rather than disappearing beneath the gushing water.
“Well, that can’t be good” quips Oliver, in one of the film’s most disarmingly funny moments. But as well as performatively underlining just how alien this social rung he is entering into is supposed to be, it’s also a very unsubtle admission that all is not what it seems. And, after several long weeks of playing cuckoo at Saltburn, this means the first of the film’s ‘twists’ lands with all the subtlety of a rock with “fraud” painted on it.
Spoilers…ish
Oliver arrives to find the Cattons and their hangers-on already loudly discussing his scandalous family history. Rather than simmering with resentment, however, he remains utterly unflappable – something which the family incorrectly interpret as him retreating into an apologetic bubble of class-deference. Of course, they can talk this way about his family and get away with it, because this harmless prole knows his place. But their earlier failure to even place Liverpool on the map, Oliver’s wavering accent, and an unhelpfully heavy-handed framing device mean that we never come close to making the same mistake.
Things come to a head as Oliver’s birthday approaches, and Felix springs a surprise on him. They are driving all the way to Prescot, to brave the rampant drug dens that supposedly riddle the whole of Merseyside, and reconcile Oliver with his junkie mother. Except that when they get there – when they reach the leafy-green suburbs, when Oliver’s mother emerges from a comfortably middle-class house, and when his father (whose death has been greatly exaggerated) follows her – it becomes clear that everything Felix knew about Oliver was a fabrication.
But of course, it was. It wasn’t the first lie, and it won’t be the last that Oliver spins to get himself out of this situation. And it won’t be the first or the last time that the audience will have seen such a telegraphed ‘revelation’ coming their way over the course of Saltburn.
This is at least in part because as a piece of entertainment, Saltburn is at war with itself. To get the most out of it, the film entreaties the viewer to bring a level of intertextual awareness to proceedings, essential if they are to appreciate so much of the fun Saltburn thinks it is having.
Casting Rosamund Pike as Felix’s mother, for example, is both a joke, and a hint at what is to come, as she reverses her role from Gone Girl to become someone getting played by a kind of ‘righteous’ (in a flawed way) manipulator. Similarly, Withnail and I’s Richard E. Grant becomes the victim of some parasitic entity turning up in his manor to drain it of money and booze – a parallel which depends on you knowing, and tying in other films to this one to enjoy it, but also flagging up the obvious. The longer the film goes on, the more aware you become that you are watching parodic inversions of better-written characters, who are being deployed to overly-noticeable ends.
At the same time, as much as writer-director Emerald Fennell has downplayed it as an ‘inspiration’ (I suspect in large part because it is a pretty clear reskinning of the story and its themes), if you have seen The Talented Mr Ripley, you have essentially already seen Saltburn. Just with more naked dance sequences and viral moments for free marketing on Tik Tok.
The Talented Mr Quick
From the beginning, Oliver is fighting against accepting his own identity – and embarks on an increasingly unhinged and violent quest to assume someone else’s in the process.
In the film’s conclusion, which confirms that the framing narrative he has been delivering comes from the final moments of his plan, he spells everything out for dummies. He selected Felix as a soft target, a member of a ruling class which had no natural predators, and had become too fat and comfortable in its position of power to recognise danger. He hints that the plan, fuelled by a hate of people like the Cattons, might always have been to bump off rival birds in the nest, one by one, before inheriting it for himself. He relied upon their ignorance of ‘working class’ life to be perceived as a harmless object of pity.
But this narrator is unreliable, because we have also seen many things he leaves out of this grand arc. Most notably, the moments where he does things that nobody witnesses, and only have resonance for himself. In two of the scenes which many people picked up on for their viral, shock value alone, he does things which suggest he is infatuated with Felix. After hiding to observe his host masturbating in the bath, he sneaks into the bathroom to drink some of the draining water from the tub. And following the predictable demise of Felix (predictable in the sense that it comes with the same plot-beat as in Ripley, where his scam becomes apparent, and his love is rejected in a secluded area), Oliver stays behind, and when he is alone, undresses before laying face down on the grave, and thrusting his hips down into the soil.
From the beginning, then, it seems more likely that Oliver has been transferring his attraction to men, into a desire for their lifestyle. Of course I don’t want Felix. I just want his house, his money, his social position. What makes Saltburn a more admirable exploration of this than The Talented Mr Ripley is that this is not an exploitative will-they-won’t-they subtext. It’s just text now. It has the guts to show, rather than just hint at, the homosexuality of its lead character.
It does, however, still service the rather reactionary trope – that male violence stemming from closeted gay men failing to deal with their feelings is one of the few permitted ways to depict homosexuality in mainstream film – without seeking to modernise or examine it. In this world, Oliver is one of the most intelligent and manipulative people alive, but like the ironically limited protagonist of Limitless, he merely resorts to dominate the existing power structures, and to emulate the ideology that forced him to live life by other people’s standards. When Bradley Cooper’s penniless waster in Limitless becomes the most intelligent man in the world, he uses that to become a really good hedge-fund manager, and run for Congress. When Barry Keoghan’s repressed student finds himself running rings around the academic and social elites of Oxford, he uses that to enter the British aristocracy. But are they really that smart, if all they can think to do is place themselves in service to an order which will continue to restrict and define them for the rest of their lives? That is something which deserves further examination – but that never arrives in Saltburn. As it stands, opportunities to tie in Oliver’s struggles with his identity, and to explore criticism of the economic and social elite beyond a Third Way desire to join them both go begging, even as the run-time drags amid an all-too-familiar long-con story.
There might have been more room for that if the script were a little less concerned with being a comedy. While there are some wonderfully surprising laughs to be had, Saltburn is at its weakest when overtly trying to write class satire. At their worst, it makes the Cattons come off like Harry Enfield characters, too posh to know where Liverpool is.
Again, though, the film is at war with itself here. Because if Saltburn were to present the ruling class as it is, Oliver’s scam would have fallen apart very quickly. This is the world of The Eton Rifles (a song which I think David Cameron actually understood very well, revelling in the same accurate warning of an organised ruling class which Paul Weller intended to disgust the rest of us); a world where one class is overtly engaged in the defence of its own lot, built on the knowing domination of another.
In the world of the film, where a vaguely fun, gross farce needs to transpire, we don’t see much evidence of that. But having lived a minor version of Saltburn in my own time at university – right down to a tour of a manor complete with a friend joking about ghosts of dead relatives and visits from Henry VIII – I can assure you, the British ruling class know where Liverpool is. They know who their friends and enemies are, and how they will need to impact and influence both (occasionally interchangeable) groupings.
They prepare for this from birth – and if you really think a dodgy Scouse accent will be enough to confuse them, you’ll be in for a rude awakening on your summer holidays.