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.
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.
