This article contains spoilers for Saltburn.
Saltburn, which is out today on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Amazon Prime Video, is the most I've enjoyed a bad movie this year. Emerald Fennell's follow-up to Promising Young Woman is entertaining and looks gorgeous. The only problem is that its head is as empty as the many vacant rooms in the titular manor.
In Saltburn, Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a freshman at Oxford who meets and eventually befriends Jacob Elordi's Felix Catton, a beautiful popular boy from an extremely wealthy family. When Oliver tells Felix that he doesn't have anywhere to go for the summer after his father's death, Felix invites him to stay with him at Saltburn, his family's expansive countryside estate.
Elordi has been highly visible this fall movie season, with standout performances in Saltburn and as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla.
Once there, Felix slowly 🍸reveals himself to be an agent of quiet chaos. The film is struc🐻tured like a Mission: Impossible movie except, instead of Tom Cruise doing death-defying stunts, the set pieces involve Barry Keoghan doing puzzling (and cringe-inducing) naughty stuff.
The centerpiece of cringe is the moment when Oliver watches Felix jerk off in the bathtub, then slinks into the bathroom🌄 afterwards to lap up the bath water with a loud slurp. I’ve seen some critics accuse Fennell of homophobia for the way she handles these scenes, but I don’t really agree.
The point seems to be that the British middle class’ aspirations of wealth will largely go unfulfilled, despite intense desire. Oliver never consummates his desire for Felix, but he engages in a lot of tangentially sexual acts related to him. He slurps the bath water. He strips down and humps Felix’s freshly dug grave. He does a naked victory dance through Saltbꦚurn at the film’s end. The one true sexual act we see O🥂liver engage in is with someone close to Felix (his sister, Venetia), but Felix — and the untouchable wealth he represents — remains forever out of reach.
So, Fennell seems to be connecting sexual frustration to economic frustration. The problem is that Saltburn paints with such a haphazard brush that the picture that emerges is murky. If Oliver’s desire for Felix symbolizes his desire for wealth and status, why does his qu🍨est for wealth continue unabated after Felix’s death? The movie generally seems unsure of itself. It flashes forward in its opening moment, g𝐆iving us a pretty good idea of where things are headed. And, it keeps us clued in as it goes, too, presenting Oliver as an opportunistic gremlin throughout the film.
Keoghan is great at playing this kind of weirdo, but does it better in 2017's The Killing of a Sacred Deer. He's similarly good as the outcast Dominic Kearney in 2022's The Banshees of Inisherin.
But, at the end, it flashes back to reveal malicious unseen bits of information from key scenes, as if we hadn't picked up on Oliver's whole deal by spending two hours watching him behave badly. Oliver manages to pull the wool over Felix's eyes for the vast majority of the movie, too, despite not trying particularly hard to hide his behavior.
The result is a series of juvenile provocations that don’t seem to have much real meaning, for Oliver or for the audience. When Babylon released at the end of last December, it drew criticism that director Damien Chazelle had made a straight-laced dude’s naive idea of debauchery; that his picture of Old Hollywood excess was e🅰dgy for the sake of edginess. I di🌱dn’t feel those criticisms were entirely fair, but I do think similar critiques apply to Saltburn. ‘Isn’t this messed up?’ the movie seems to be saying as Oliver drinks Felix’s bath water. The acts it presents as taboo, like stripping naked and writhing on a grave, are underrepresented in popular culture because they seem pointless, not dangerous.
Saltburn is still worth watching, as much as I may have made it sound like it's not. It’s an entertaining movie, with fun performances from Elordi and Rosamund Pike. As shot by Linus Sandgren, it looks fantastic. Fennell is a talented image maker, but the film's visual ideas are far more coherent than the ones in her script.
Jacob Elordi Has The Movie S꧂tar Cheat Code🃏 With Priscilla And Saltburn
The young actor has played the object of intense deღsire in two of 2023's releases.
