Oliver (Barry Keoghan) does not fit in with his class at Oxford.  When he helps Filex (Jacob Elordi), one of the most popular boys in the class, with his bike, the two become fast friends looking past the massive rift between their respective social and ecconomic classes.  Late in the semester, news comes to Oxford that Oliver’s father has passed away from a drug overdose.  Not wanting his friend to return to his now-broken home, Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer with him at Saltburn, the sprawling family estate house in the countryside.  Secrets reveal themselves in the moonlight while tensions simmer under the summer sun, and tragedy will strike before the fall semester starts again. 

Emerald Fennell writes and directs Saltburn for MGM Studios who continues their hold over the Thanksgiving frame with dramatic psychosexual thrillers after last year’s cannibal romance, Bones and All (2022).  The 127-minute film does not get bogged down by its themes of possessive jealousy as it leans into the party atmosphere of the middle-aughts as vices are funded by a family that never even needs to look at the checkbook before making a purchase.  Aided by Suzie Davies’ production design that helped bend the privately owned Northamptonshire manor’s already stalely personality to meet Fennell’s vision, the sophomore effort continues to examine dark and dangerous aspects of modern young relationships while wrapping it all up in a bold and colorful bow so that we are coaxed into having fun and do not realize just how dangerous these stories are until it is too late. 

Keoghan has made a name for himself playing characters just off of center, and while detractors of the actor or the film may claim that this role does not challenge the norm for the Irish-born actor, it cannot be denied that he is as captivating of an enigma as ever here.  Framed by his narration, the film is filtered through his eyes, and it stays mysterious because Fennell’s script never gives us a good handle on what Oliver’s motivations are.  Regardless, he is dangerous, and right as the film begins to really turn, he whispers to Venetia (Alison Oliver) as he seduces her in the moonlit garden, that he is a vampire. For much of the remaining runtime, Fennell gives us little reason to doubt him as he stalks the family in their own home.  This threat, though, does not pay off in the traditional sense, but from then on, Oliver takes the reigns of the story as a menacing force which up until now had mostly been held by Felix’s mother, Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), whose beguiling and steely resolve had kept Oliver on the defensive.  Given how important Elspeth will become in the narrative, it is refreshing that Fennell rejected the all-too-easy Oedipal route, but she also de-claws the lioness at the head of the family, sidelining her in the latter half when she should be at her most threatening.

Oliver is not the only one who starts the summer out at the sprawling estate. Elspeth and her husband, Sir James (Richard E. Grant) preside over the manor and the additional houseguests: friend of the family Pamela (Carey Mulligan), another Oxford student, Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), and the expansive staff led by Duncan (Paul Rhys).  As this cast of incredibly unhappy people bump and bustle against each other, the slight framework of a narrative arc does begin to reveal itself.  Saltburn is a tale about obsessive and aggressive jealousy not dissimilar from the Tom Ripley arc as previously emulated by Alain Delon and Matt Damon in the past.  What Keoghan does differently, and under the direction of Fennell, is that Oliver is a much stranger figure than the otherwise put-together Tom.  One night early in the summer, for example, Oliver has a very peculiar way of cleaning the bathroom after Felix has finished his bath and from that moment onward the film takes a much darker turn as we know Oliver to be more than just the oafish punching bag he is often mistaken for.  We lose our trust in him at that moment, but it is too late as we are already trapped in Fennell’s web of intrigue. 

The object of his desire as set up in his opening narration is Felix, though he is careful to note that he was not in love with him, something his actions will seemingly betray but to take his word at face value makes Oliver that much more of a dangerous and desperate predator.  It is not until much later in the film that he really begins to apply pressure and lash out against Farleigh who, according to Oliver, occupies too much of Felix’s attention.  When his provocations go unanswered, Oliver plots to get the boy evicted in another beguiling act, the consequences of, unfortunately, do not seem to be meaningfully engaged with by the film.  In short, Oliver breaks into Farleigh’s room while the boy is sleeping, and rapes him.  That Fennell treats this as a non-event is quite troubling, especially given how the act was – rightfully – condemned in her previous feature, Promising Young Woman (2020).  It is the most glaring instance of the style and allure of the film slipping from the director’s control making the unsavory nature of these characters who live in a world without consequence painfully apparent to audiences who can use this as a checking out point of the film that is too deep into the plot to reel them back in. 

Opposite of Keoghan is Elordi who again proves that his star is on the rise, and though he has not yet had his On the Waterfront (1954) moment, it is only a matter of time. While the camera is all too eager to capture the young Adonis as he struts through the halls of the manor in designer shirts with one button too many undone or sprawled by the pool tanning his taught skin, the actor does not rely just on his looks to keep audience’s attention even though that is much of Felix’s hook in the narrative.  As the story unfolds, Felix is seen as an incredibly generous figure as he opens his family home to his friends and relations, but his kindness is being taken advantage of according to Oliver at least, and he is resolved to protect and defend his fellow student.  As the Greenleaf in this fated dynamic, Felix, through Elordi’s incredible sense of building empathy, finds a way more so than his predecessors to foster a connection with audiences which helps Saltburn reach a different flavor of catharsis than the other iterations of this tale.  A playboy through and through as Maurice Ronet and Jude Law before him, Saltburn spends more time with Felix and paints him as a boy with the incredible weight of expectation on his shoulders.  Expectations as to what are still left a little unclear given that his parents party like they are still in college as well, but Elordi portrays so much struggling potential in his performance that his ultimate demise is felt not only on a narrative level, but with his energy absent from the film, the tone itself takes on one of mourning in the final twenty or so minutes. 

It is a shame, though, that for all the work the incredible cast does and for the level of detail and design in this world that is as sexy as it is dangerous, Saltburn as a film feels a little slight and a little toothless.  This all points back to Fennell who has a clear vision for the world of the film and achieves that, but her vision is a little too wide to fit into the 4:3 frame which she confines her narrative to.  There are so many themes that are grazed against but not fully examined; obsession, wealth, and race are the driving three.  Fennell gives us everything we need very early on but sticks with the students throughout the semester at Oxford entirely too long when she could have been working out some of these themes and really interrogating these characters rather than having them laze around the dorms or get drunk at pubs.  It sets a good tone and environment, sure, but her pacing is a little too lackadaisical and she seems too precious to make those cuts that would zip us along faster.  She coaxes out great performances across the board so anything left behind could still have been portrayed by her cast later on so that nothing was lost but there would be more to gain. 

Verbose but slightly hollow, Saltburn is still a delight to watch unfold.  There is so much to take in, and the style is an intensification of that seen in Fennell’s previous effort, but it is window dressing to a story that could and should have been much more fearsome.  A montage at the end reveals that Oliver had been pulling the strings from the beginning, but we learn that across the span of the narrative already so the runtime could have been better spent watching him lay these traps.  We are not allowed to be an omnipresent observer, nor are we allowed unfettered access to all that Oliver knows so we spend much of the film in a state of confusion rather than that of a distinctly different state of suspense.  Fennell distracts us with beautiful images so we do not rebel against her in the moment, but the film, unfortunately, fades quickly from memory instead of lingering like a ghost in the halls of our minds.