Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

[therewillbeblus]

Rosamund Pike will star in Emerald Fennell's next film, Saltburn

I seem to recall reading an interview with a male actor within the last few weeks who also alluded to working with Fennell on her next project, but I'm struggling to place who

[brundlefly]

Teaser for Emerald Fennell's Saltburn.

[therewillbeblus]

Teaser for Emerald Fennell's Saltburn.

[brundlefly]

Teaser for Emerald Fennell's Saltburn.

Trailer

[therewillbeblus]

Saltburn

Emerald Fennell's sophomore thriller is an increasingly mood-concentrated, perverse, and predictable follow up to Promising Young Woman. It's not better, but it's also an entirely different movie. Sure, it retains the same visual and comic wit, and the deliciously schizophrenic cocktail of the alienating-alluring dynamic between content and audience, but overall Fennell is trading thematic ambitions for tone-tinkering and aesthetic experimentation. She more explicitly plays into rather than subverts familiar devices, and she's much subtler about doing the latter this outing.

Fennell is constantly walking that line between feeding into expectations and twisting things just a tad. Barry Keoghan's mug announces more about his character than the script pages. We get a Patricia Highsmith vibe before the credits start. Keoghan is so perfectly cast as as the barely-enigmatic vacuum of a lone soul, that his mere presence spotlights the writing on the wall. But Fennell isn't interested in reinventing the wheels of content; she wants to boldly play 'chicken' with this scary but intriguing dynamic and let us bask in the pleasures of watching things play out, particularly in form and narrative flow. There are elongated dramatic interpersonal exchanges (Alison Oliver is riveting in at least two showstopping scenes), hilarious ones (I didn't know Rosamund PIke had such comedic timing), a fairy tale blend of dazzling eye candy and The Shining decor infused with a knack for style, and a killer soundtrack. Promising Young Woman explicitly elided sexual content, but Fennell goes full tilt here for a very similar reason - though this time it's thematically relevant to get sex all visually coated in violence and revulsion. Her first film was about the (problematic) painful coping process of reliving a sexual trauma - it would've been exploitative and antithetical to the film's spirit to show us; but this film is about the (problematic) glorification of living a fantasy - quite literally the opposite (and essentially switching the POV to that of the cookie-cutter coercive men from the last movie) - and so it uses sex to reach the same troubling ends about its principal character.

Saltburn feels like Fennell took one of the deliberately-underdeveloped Nice Guy losers from Promising Young Woman and dropped him into a Tom Ripley novel. Only this time he's contending -not with a woman- but with the love-hate relationship the faux Nice Guy loser has with actual cool nice guys. The ideal Guy, who is organically kind-hearted, other-focused, interesting and attractive.. The Guy who they desperately want to be, befriend, love, and be loved by, and intuitively know they can never attain - or fill that aching, insatiable, narcissistic hole that craves infinite social validation. It's both a devastating condition and the most terrifying type of personality, and Fennell evades a prioritization of sympathy over honesty in an on-brand move of light subversion - less in narrative and more in tonal intentionality.

Spoiler

For example, here, regardless of the popularity or wealth or condescending nature of Felix's family, Keoghan's Oliver's abhorrent behavior trumps any 'edge' he could get with the satire. The film is deceptively satire - the big 'twist' is Felix is actually a genuinely good person, not a rich asshole... or, if he is the latter, it pales next to the virtue of the former! Similarly, Oliver's angles for sympathy are obstructed - Fennell won't give him a boost with poverty, given the reveal about his family of origin.

I also wonder if the ease at which Oliver is able to infiltrate each family member, Parasite-style, has more to do with their earnest belief in good-naturedness, having come from a life of luck and fortune, than it indicates Oliver's skills at manipulating people. Fennell is a talented scribe, and his lines are so transparently contrived that I have to imagine it's part of an intentional strategy to showcase the underlying bitter sadness of all characters. The aftertaste of the quick laughs at the family's expense is one of sincere pathos at the situation that's playing out. Their naivete isn't coming from privilege we should scoff at, but from a place of vulnerability that's sad - because it's sad that such a coveted quality of seeing the best in people is placed as an Achilles Heel target that lowers a person in the food chain. Regardless of wealth and status, people who are amoral, observant psychopaths contain the optimal human qualities to succeed in this society, including the tools that best predict the potential for upward mobility... less anchors, after all (reminds me of my reading of The Parallax View). So Oliver's line-feedings work on many because of something provocatively tragic rather than funny, even if it starts with a joke.

What might feel set up to be a takedown of the feelings-burying bourgeoisie winds up pulling those punches to land on a more humanistic worldview: It's depressing that these people are unskilled in, and have concocting self-constructed barriers to process emotions, and it's far better to be someone who feels and invites others in -regardless of the terms- than one who feels for themselves, damned be the world or the cost. At least morally speaking, with the twist that morals may not matter when push comes to shove.

The connective tissue between Fennell’s two movies is a faint and broad, but fierce and potent one: She disempowers toxic male personalities by demonstrating how pathetic and unskilled their tactics are, but also lifts the veil of satire to sincerely show how empowered they are nonetheless - a reality that cannot be circumvented even within the art eviscerating its constructed value. The chess pieces’ positions speak for themselves.

The brutal antisocial satire on sin supersedes the low-hanging satirical fruits of rich v poor pining, though she gets a few brief, strong shots in there too, before her attention darts elsewhere - as close to the impenetrable void of the human psyche as she can get, but this is one that we aren't allowed in, and aren't sure we want to go either. Which is fine, because Fennell can take the hint, say Fuck You and focus on the atmosphere while she waits. [And boy does she have fun: there’s at least one long take (though I can think of a few, including the last one) that is so wildly provocative that it seems ripe to ruffle feathers (there were many audible reactions of disgust in my theatre). But I think it can be read as brilliantly as the switch to zoomed-out long shot in Wolf of Wall Street’s midpoint crawl to the car - both employ tonal shifts using objectivity and medium cues, but Fennell does both from the same placement and achieves a different kind of distress and dark comedy entirely.]

Promising Young Woman had a protagonist who demanded empathy and invited curiosity into her complexity. Saltburn obstructs that empathic angle by having no real 'self' for us to access. So while it may be more thematically straightforward, it's a riskier, deeply self-conscious piece on rotting humanity wearing shards of stale glitter from 2006 when Fennell was in University. I imagine this will have a tougher time finding its audience - and not just because it's not as zeitgeist-y. I suspect people will be puzzled why the obvious targets for satirical bits are superseded by the urgency of its darker overtones and anthropological truths. So yeah, Fennell infuses recycled material with a glossy light touch on the grossness of it all, making it fun and rendering clear brutality simultaneously. I’m not sure what she’s doing so right exactly, but it’s another messy movie full of her idiosyncratic, digestible gifts, and I'm here for more.

[nicolas]

Saw Saltburn and loved it! Had a wonderful time and left surprised how such a seemingly shallow, derivative, surface-level film provoked me to think in a way a seemingly dense, layered, original film like Anatomy of a Fall didn’t. Also fully agree with therewillbeblus’ phenomenal take on the film, which I wish I read before writing my way less eloquent blurb (see spoilers). Now I can only pray and hope that this visually and aurally gorgeous work gets its 4K UHD with Atmos as soon as possible.

Spoiler

All the claims about “Saltburn” being nothing less than an empty, cheap, good-looking corpse of a film derivative of Pasolini and so many others are understandable and most likely justified. After all, we’ve been spoiled by great films which attempted to attack our firm class division system and while doing so working towards flipping everything on its head. “Parasite” obviously comes to mind, which Emerald Fennell was aware of and likely used as a reference when she shopped her second feature to buyers. Instead of the aforementioned cornerstone, Fennell had to fob herself off with moths instead, but despite the apparent difference in quality of the films, it doesn’t mean “Saltburn” is an epic disaster.

“Saltburn” is pop confection whereas “Parasite” managed the rare feat of being enjoyable as both pop AND high art (as well as acclaimed across the board by all camps of interest). We shouldn’t make it too easy on ourselves and just compare what should likely not be compared in the first place.

If we want to compare, we’d be better served with other pop confections like “Spring Breakers”, which is as unafraid as “Saltburn” to cater to our most simple desires. But it doesn’t stop there, its admirers defend and critics shrug off. Both “superficial” “pop” films actually use their fake, stylized, made-up, candy-color, prickly tasting, one frame a painting surface to tell us about what’s underneath. A deep void of nothingness, sadness and the need to escape and forget. In these cases and elsewhere like with “The Neon Demon”, the abundance of style, the total synergy of a film’s way of storytelling with its style, IS its surface. These films invite us to study the surface like the fewest do nowadays.

It’s all there if we want it. In Jacob Elordi’s perfect body, in Barry Keoghan’s eyes, in Rosamund Pike’s hilarious and deeply disturbing blabbering, in all the clothes and objects and Linus Sandgren’s colors. It’s about a young man wanting to belong and be a part of the group of people that take pride in enjoyment. Of letting go of a first chapter in life and changing characters. Every action of Oliver is understandable, throughout the entire film. The stories he makes up about his past, the difference between him pretending not to understand the things he actually understands better than anyone else. It’s a young man wanting to taste the sweet wine of success and the feeling of superiority he’s only gotten to glimpse at from a spectator’s point of view.

From another perspective, it’s someone who knows life from its most gentlemanly, tailored and normative sides. He’s educated himself about the theory of what Felix, his family and friends live.
The way the great Jacob Elordi plays Felix is that he wants to experience the exact opposite and therefore finds kinship in Oliver who, due to his upbringing and complete distancing from Felix’s class, is able to look at Felix as a human being instead of just this sexy, rich, majestic entity that longs to be devoured. Felix is totally sincere with Oliver unlike with the other people he got into contact with earlier in his life as told by other characters.

The only thing that deluded Oliver were the circumstances about Felix’s rejection of him. Felix never had to fabricate what Oliver did due to his family’s wealth, which is the reason Felix couldn’t immediately understand Oliver’s lies. The very last moment the two share in the maze before Oliver departed seems to imply that Felix sensed his reasoning, which does render their story a little more tragic.

In the end, the film leaves open whether Oliver was all about the wealth and inheritance or whether these were “just” side-effects of him racing full throttle into the abyss after actually chasing genuine human connections and being so existentially disappointed from not finding them on the surface in all the bright and shiny emptiness. Oliver departs the film as a tragic joker, dancing his way through what’s now his… or not. We’re left stunned, appalled, and on the other hand admiring while also feeling compassion. For an apparently totally surface-level film, I’d say not bad at all.

[JamesF]

I really enjoyed the kinky power plays, escalating outrageousness and barbed dialogue from the first two-thirds but was quickly disappointed how predictable and, frankly, dumb as rocks the third act becomes.

Spoiler

There’s a much more interesting and unpredictable resolution for this film where no-one dies rather than the poundshop Tom Ripley that Fennell opts for instead, and the grave-humping scene might be the stupidest thing I’ve seen on a cinema screen all year.

[therewillbeblus]

See I thought that was intentional, and it makes me wonder what kind of movie detractors are expecting - from both this and Promising Young Woman? Just like Cassie can't actually have her cake and eat it too -even in the world of the film's fictitious fantasy- in order to achieve a sustainable catharsis in her identity, neither can anyone else. We're not meant to watch cool things unfold or watch deserved comeuppance, but a pathetic man doing pathetic unskilled things, and watch as they become increasingly less interesting, or rather fall from a place of being capable of coated in glamor and passed off as glamorous. The whole point seemed to be that this story is nothing more than what you anticipate, but because of its self-awareness and clever anti-cinematic interventions that taunt its audience, I thought it was a quiet masterpiece. But without that obviously "predictable" and "dumb" reveals in the last act, the film becomes a lot more problematic and feeds the opposing ethos of its auteur

There's a balance between the validated glee of surface-level pleasures that attract these characters to these dangerous worlds to them, including a fantastical or philosophical disempowerment of threatening vehicles to that faux-safety, and that very real, practical capacity for harm that artists et al. are powerless to influence with their satirical jokes, and Fennell has the audacity to recognize this last part in a very caustic manner - it needs to be said, and it's going to repel your audience if said this way, but maybe that's the point? Say it loud and proud, or what's the point in being just another indie voice doing half measures

[JamesF]

Whereas I just see a talented filmmaker succumbing to lazy cliche and empty, self-conscious juvenilia. To be clear, I really liked Promising Young Woman (third act included!) but I don’t see any consistency in theme and approach across to this film, just an award-winning young filmmaker hot off their debut being given a bigger budget and freedom to do something loose and freaky (which is great!) but choosing the most well-trodden, least interesting way of resolving the various tensions it sets up (which is not!). The alternative didn’t have to be “cool”, whatever that means - I agree it’s not that kind of film. It’s still a handsome and often laugh-out-loud effort with a lot to recommend it, I just wish I saw what you did in it and hope Fennell can curb her worst instincts next time round.

(post edited to be less gratuitously rude)

[aox]

This absolutely didn't work for me, in the same way Mystic River doesn't work at all. The film is deceptive in withholding information within scenes we had full access to. Good mysteries, IMO, lay their cards on the table and work within that framework to an intriguing goal. This was an exercise in petty omission.

Spoiler

Seeing the shot of the money in the wallet during the flashback at the end was infuriating. So completely unnecessarily deceptive. I want my two hours back.

[brundlefly]

Wait, people think this is a mystery?

[aox]

Wait, people think this is a mystery?

Maybe "twist ending" would be more appropriate?

[brundlefly]

Wait, people think this is a mystery?

Maybe "twist ending" would be more appropriate?

But it's. Okay, just in case people do think those things apply I'll go

Spoiler

spoilerbox on it. But the film is told (and I thought telegraphed) as a confession from the start? And though certainly it has murders and sadistically drags us through recaps/reveals at the end, those were all preposterously obvious? (I had not guessed the thumb tack, as if that matters.) Oliver's class status is revealed when Felix takes him to his bland, comfortable home. That was a solid twist. That was the full wallet right there.

The plot's too comicly trite to take its murder mystery theatre or its manipulations seriously. I'm in the middle on the movie (as I was for Promising Young Woman) but its highs are undeniable. (And I loved the grave humping, could have gone on twice as long.) Wish Fennell had omitted the drudgery of the plot clothesline altogether and just banged hot and hilarious from highlight to highlight and rolled credits. But maybe she had to include her whole 2006 Indie Blog Hits mixtape so padded this thing out like forty minutes too long.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I'm 50-50 on watching this and have read the plot synopsis, but the ending comes as absolutely no surprise given the trailer's set up - it seems like a combo of

Spoiler

Teorema, Parasite and Kind Hearts and Coronets

[vertigo]

Fennel was born in the right side of the tracks in London, so she knows THEM since she was a little girl. I did not like the film (I only loved the bath scene, and the vampire cunnilingus) but Fennel caughts the uppers (Nancy Mitford's U and not U) exactly as they are: their codes, their language, their coldness, specially by the mother, she's great, their privileged close close close and little world... in BRIDESHEAD.

She was 18 years old with the right people, come on! She was in, social and talented predestinated.

https://www.tatler.com/gallery/emerald- ... 18th-party

I loved her debut, another BDP vendetta protagonist, like myself.