“Saltburn” features a cinematic style reminiscent of director Luca Guadagnino’s northern Italy (“Call Me by Your Name,” 2017). Barry Keoghan is Oliver Quick, an insecure Tom Ripley during a lavish 2006 at Oxford.
Writer and director Emerald Fennell is an academy-award winning director (“Promising Young Woman,” 2020) who has an eerie talent for exposing the horrors behind who everyone believes is a good but disenfranchised person.
Oliver begins as a Harry Potter archetype, complete with robes and scarves, admiring an affluent and charming Jacob Elordi from a distance until they somehow serendipitously meet when Felix (Elordi) gets a flat tire and Oliver offers him his bike.
Oliver continues to struggle to fit in but wins Felix over with his tragic stories of his father’s death and mother’s alcoholism. When summer break rolls around, out of guilt, Felix offers Oliver to stay with him at his home for the summer: Saltburn.
When Oliver arrives, we meet a hilariously judgmental Rosamund Pike (think if Amy told Nick how she really felt), cynical American cousin Farleigh, the tastefully salacious Venetia, and a very suspicious, lurking butler named Duncan.
Amongst the walnut ceilings and a literal maze, the house is crawling with ghosts from the beginning, a certain darkness in every corner the cameras pass by that the audience can feel from the first walk-through. In a pink shirt, Elordi is a taller Chalamet as he tells Oliver they have to share a bathroom.
Like Guadagnino’s cinematography, the lighting tells a simultaneous story.
The light at the beginning of each scene is soft like Crisco out by the pool, the July sunlight warped by the heat and muddied through cigarette smoke, soporific like lavender. The buttercream sun frosts the sprawling gingerbread house while the fields of goldenrod yawn.
The shots evolve into a thick orange as the evening approaches; they play tennis in tuxedos and their long shadows bake into the brown grass. When night falls, an asphyxiated blue illuminates all the drunk guests as a party reverberates throughout the evening.
The sensuality of time breathing in front of us, the summer passing by leisurely is enough to make anyone jealous of this lifestyle.
Fennell lets time between Oliver and Felix marinate, each time they’re alone the walls of the room swelling with the tension of someone who is in love and someone else so blissfully unaware.
Without being self-indulgent, Fennell follows Oliver’s conquest to become someone else entirely. He quietly observes everyone, shapeshifting into the person they want him to be before their eyes. He moves with a specific purpose that will begin to make your blood run cold. His laughs are mechanical, his expressions and comments becoming strategic. His gaze averts as soon as you look, his back quickly turns as soon as you feel someone watching.
He loves Felix like deer who falls in love with a coyote. But, in reality, Oliver is the emaciated, ravenous coyote, Elordi the clumsy, handsome stag offering a suffering monster a spot in his closet for the night.
Fennell artfully hand-stitches a story of obsession and deception from a female gaze that paints these men just vulnerable and thoughtful enough to remind us of their fictionalized nature, but conniving enough to remind us how real they can be.
Oliver scares us, but in the way our reflection scares us when we walk by a mirror we didn’t know was there. The way we all want to be admired, and the ways we would imagine ourselves going to extremes to get what we want. The intense and taboo emotions throughout this film evaluate the way love is felt and expressed not only in the film, but behind closed doors.
The film exploded in popularity on TikTok, many labeling the film graphic due to a few sexually explicit scenes. To address THOSE scenes, yes, it might be best to keep this film out of the queue for a G-rated movie night.
Released just before 2024, it is one of the most talked about films of the year. It is available on Amazon Prime with a membership.