‘Saltburn’ Review: Emerald Fennell’s Fluidless World
'Saltburn' wants the idea of being nasty to be enough for us.
Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn follows Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan)—a scholarship student at a boarding school overflowing with rich kids—as he infiltrates the wealthy and beautiful Felix Catton’s (Jacob Elordi) life. Oliver maintains his relationship with Felix (and by extension Felix’s friends, family, and massive estate) partially by evoking pity, and partially by saying what he deems necessary to stay endeared to the Cattons, even if what he shares skirts closer to fiction than reality.
Much like Fennell’s debut feature, Promising Young Woman, borrowed from a certain Y2K hyper feminine pop sensibility, loaded up with Britney covers and glitter, Saltburn is all school aged wealthy lechery a lá Cruel Intentions. Set in 2006 (with the endless pop hit needle drops to prove it!), Saltburn very much wants to be a successor to the era of the nasty little teen sex thriller of the late 90s and early aughts.
Oliver’s obsession with the Catton’s glow—a beauty, finesse, and archness to them all that is a testament to their high status—is frequently portrayed through a literal consumption of their bodily fluids. Saltburn seems to think it’s offering us a pure hit of nasty depravity as Oliver slurps Felix’s bathwater, or performs sex acts on Felix’s drunken sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver) while she’s on her period.
Welcome to Emerald Fennell’s “sick and twisted” mind.
Fennell admittedly has a visual flair—the film looks lovely, and is shot interestingly enough. But all of these supposedly “nasty” moments (the sex appeal the film’s beating heart hinges upon) are neither coy enough to let a viewer’s mind run wild, nor are they excessive enough to make one’s gut twist with pleasure and/or revulsion. Bathwater, dim lighting, and close ups above the shoulders keep us from ever seeing the very fluids we are meant to be experiencing in repulsed fascination. Visually, Saltburn fails to present Oliver’s infiltration of the Catton family, and his slurping up of their blood and guts, with a ruggedness or rawness. Instead, the film presents these moments with a stylistically upturned nose — Saltburn wants the idea of being nasty to be enough for us.
This is not Fennell’s first time playing with the idea of nastiness without a glimmer of teeth. Promising Young Woman promises the blood and guts of a rape revenge story with no payoff, an attempt at genre-bending to not just uninteresting, but fairly politically miserable, results. At one point, Cassie (Carey Mulligan) spits in Ryan’s (Bo Burnham) coffee. He swallows it gamely and with much eye contact, but it somehow doesn’t pay off as erotic or gross, even if one presumes Fennell intended to coax out an icky feeling.
Everything is a softened edge with Fennell. No one ever spits, orgasms, or bleeds without the event being diluted, often literally. To let our bodies, our carnal urges, our natural cycles, exist in their rawest forms—the thing that makes perversion so delicious—is not permitted in Fennell’s world. The only time we see Felix fuck, he is literally in angel wings donned for a costume party. It’s impossible to have perverted fun in a world so pristine.
This is perhaps part of the reason Saltburn’s storyline is so unfathomable, intangible, and fluffy. Despite strong enough performances from Elordi and Keoghan with what they’re asked to work with, Saltburn doesn’t have the sensual heft of the late-90s and early-aughts genre films it borrows from, nor the characterization and structure required for the storyline to feel anything but not quite gay enough and not quite thrilling enough—with a “twist” that feels blindsiding and unearned instead of interesting. The film’s midway point reveals that Oliver is not exactly who we thought him to be (though he’s certainly close enough). But the film’s last act reveals Oliver to be not at all who we thought him to be, in a turn so sharp it’s unsatisfying instead of interesting.
Fennell is an artist seemingly consumed by some of our largest structural power dynamics—the patriarchal subjugation of women, the ways in which the rich toy with the poor, and our potential to subvert how we understand these things. She seems very interested in making these abstract ideologies tangible through her art, be it through heavy-handed satire or through what it means for these power dynamics to be tied to the natural functions of the human body: things like sweat, blood, and semen. But Fennell lacks the ability to make these visceral things feel visceral. Saltburn feels almost frightened of what it would mean to look at the mess and the grime head-on. Is a nasty psychosexual film made for polite society really a nasty psychosexual film at all?
Upsettingly, the very final moments of the film are the most fun—as Oliver becomes a nasty character finally laid (literally) bare, and celebrating in unabashed, twirling glee as he dances nude through the Catton estate. It would be fabulous if not so unearned, but at the very least it’s entertaining. Saltburn wants to be so much more than it is, but it’s scared of the bodily fluids that it claims to wallow in. The way Oliver moves in the final moments are, at last, a moment of fluidity in an otherwise fluidless film.
Interesting take. I never really considered the film from that aspect before and I think if it actually embodied the nastiness it seemed to want to have embodied I wouldn't have been able to stomach it. I certainly wouldn't have been able to rewatch it either. I was more so focused on the characters and the plot and the themes it brought up which I all thought made for a really good film.