Fantastic Fest ’23: Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn is razor-sharp, darkly funny, and unabashedly horny

Saltburn. // Courtesy of MGM/Amazon Studios

This is part of our coverage of new genre films premiering at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. 

While doing press rounds for Promising Young Woman in 2020, Emerald Fennell told reporters that as a precocious seven-year-old, she told her family “I want to write stories about murder.” She certainly did that with her debut, but Promising Young Woman is about much more than just murder. It’s technically a caustic revenge story in which murder plays a role. 

Saltburn, Fennell’s follow-up, very much is a story about murder. It’s The Talented Mr. Ripley wrapped up in Evelyn Waugh finery with acid for blood. Fennell’s second film is wickedly funny, unflinchingly nasty and horny as hell. Watching it, you get the sense that Promising Young Woman was merely the writer-director’s attention-grabbing opening statement. Saltburn is the work of a filmmaker working from a place of self-assured confidence. It feels like a glorious announcement of the kind of work we can expect from Fennell going forward. Bring it on.

It’s 2006 when we meet Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a dweeby scholarship student at Oxford with a quiet voice and unfashionable clothes who doesn’t quite fit in with the school’s dominant rich, popular set. Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) is the king of that set who, after an act of kindness from Oliver in a time of need, takes the awkward fellow first-year under his wing. Oliver is grateful, and clearly infatuated with his new golden boy bestie.

Oliver comes from a rough home, and when summer holidays arrive, he has nowhere to go. Felix invites Oliver to come back with him to Saltburn, his family’s massive estate. There Oliver receives the hospitality of Felix’s vain-but-generous mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), scatterbrained father James (Richard E. Grant) and moody sister Venetia (Alison Oliver). Oxford classmate and American cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) is rather less welcoming, seeing Oliver as an interloper on territory he is desperate to maintain his claim to.

Ripley allusions begin early on, with Fennell leaving breadcrumbs letting us know what kind of story we’re in for, though there are plenty of icky twists throughout that make Saltburn fully her own (seriously, Patricia Highsmith eat your heart out). Keoghan’s Oliver mimics Tom Ripley’s initially benign vibes, complete with spectacles and faux-sincerity, displaying more confidence after befriending Elordi’s Felix who, like Dickie Greenleaf, is an effortlessly magnetic adonis. Ripley’s Freddie Miles gets a tidy analogue in Farleigh, and Marge Sherwood in Venetia.

In terms of sexuality, Saltburn goes places Highsmith and Anthony Minghella could only suggest. Fennell and cinematographer Linus Sandgren are besotted with the male leads in a way that reflects Oliver’s own obsessions and emerging ego, but also amps up the film’s horniness as a whole. Elordi is an easy figure to linger on — that’s the point of his character — but Fennell also finds unexpectedly stunning angles for the typically awkward Keoghan. His chemistry with Elordi is so strong, and both actors lit so lovingly that you practically will them to make out whenever they’re on screen, even after we’re clued into the discomforting intensity of Oliver’s interest in Felix.

While there’s much of Highsmith’s novel and its 1999 adaptation here, there’s also a distinctly bitter, Waugh-esque satire of British aristocracy that, combined with mid-aughts-appropriate cultural references, makes Saltburn something all its own. Fennell wears her influences boldly on her sleeve, then makes a curious class divide thriller that both does her inspirations proud and brings them into the present with a dark cackle. It’s gorgeous to look at, uncomfortable to think about and provides its cast of bright young things their strongest performances yet. Don’t be surprised if, a couple of days after seeing it once, you’ll want to watch it all over again.