2023 Movie
Dir. Emerald Fennell · United Kingdom, United States of America · English
A black comedy of perilous desire that's perfectly acted and rightfully unhinged
Oscar-winner Emerald Fennell got a lot of free reign with her debut, Promising Young Woman, which was a slightly modest ordeal even with a lead of Carrey Mulligan’s calibre. But now, with her sophomore film, she go to have some fun. Assembling a devout cast of particularly skilled actors—Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, and Mulligan again—seems like an obvious decision, but the mix of them all is unlike anything we’ve seen before. A class satire, a psychological thriller, and a psychosexual drama, Saltburn is high class entertainment, with a snappy script, and many tricks up its sleeve. Brace yourselves for some bath-action, grave-action, and full-moon-menstrual-action and many other scenes you may have not ever pictured shown on the screen. Actually, it’s impossible to prepare for a film like this one, but being open certainly helps digest the shock and provocations that are there for you to behold.
Struggling to find his place at Oxford University, student Oliver Quick finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton, who invites him to Saltburn, his eccentric family's sprawling estate, for a summer never to be forgotten.
"“Saltburn” succeeds in slashing our expectations about how people are supposed to behave in polite society."
— Christy Lemire
It's mid-2000s: an outsider at Oxford University, Oliver (Barry Keoghan) befriends the aristocratic heir Felix (Jacob Elordi), and by extension, his whole family during one unforgettable summer at their castle, Saltburn.
Fennell's Oscar certainly helped get cinematographer Linus Sandgren (Babylon, LaLa Land, No Time To Die) on board for her second feature. Even if his style can be described as "pure Hollywood", anyone who's seen Damien Chazelle's Babylon knows the resilience put into constructing complex scenes with a lot of props and action. For Saltburn, Sandgren's mastery manifests in tight framing that's often counter-intuitive: a hard cut to a sink full of vomit, to make us focus on the reflection in the mirror above; a long take of a naked, dynamic dance number, or a quick-paced montage of all the major dramatic events in the film played at its very start. The visuals of Saltburn are unapologetically bold, including all these moments where Felix is framed as a god-like creature, in close-ups of the wet hair on his neck, an overexposed smile looking away from the sun, or a clandestine peak of him in the bath. The fascination, embodied by Olvier, cannot get more tactile than this.
The things we'd do for Jacob Elordi...
Golden Globes
2 noms
BAFTA
5 noms
Savina Petkova, PhD, is a Bulgarian film critic and curator based in London whose work has appeared in Sight and Sound, Variety, Little White Lies, Cineuropa, and MUBI Notebook. She is the Programming Lead for Cambridge Film Festival and a senior editor at Talking Shorts, with a focus on contemporary European cinema.
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