Review: Saltburn
Amazon Prime¹: It’s Fifty Shades of Brideshead for Gen Z!
It’s hard to know where to start with Saltburn. It’s not that it’s stylistically all over the place. It’s not, it looks beautiful, it’s just that as you watch you are constantly reminded of all sorts of callbacks to any number of films, and books, which I suppose is what makes it a hugely interesting and fun watch. But this is going to be a spoliery bit of writing, so if you don’t want to know what happens, don’t read along, eh?
The opening shots are familiar to anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Morse (or Endeavour): the approach through Oxford past the Radcliffe Camera, into the entrance of Brasenose College.² This is our first view of Oliver Quick (played by Barry Keoghan, looking rather unsettlingly like Ezra Miller here, as it happens), a scholarship kid from Merseyside bumbling into an altogether alien environment in his ill-fitting jacket, wire-framed “northern prole” glasses and try-hard college scarf, looking every inch the dorky student stereotype from every bank advert in the 1980s.
Ollie’s early interactions are awkward and maladroit, designed to elicit some sympathy, and make us feel for the “normal” kid dumped into a privileged and strange new world. The moment in his first college tutorial where fellow student Farleigh insouciantly rocks in fashionably late, then discovers his tutor (a nicely laconic Reece Sheersmith cameo) had known his mother when they were undergraduates points up all too clearly to him (and us) that Ollie is just a jumped-up arriviste, the Billy-no-mates token northerner floundering in this ocean of hidden codes. That said, we soon see that Ollie is not a doormat, when he is quick to pour acid over an attempt by Farleigh to put him down in another tutorial.
It isn’t long before Ollie first encounters Felix, who is the effortlessly charming and handsome scion of the Catton family, and the centre of attention of a privileged coterie of student hangers-on. We’re immediately being guided to think of Brideshead, and Charles Ryder’s Oxford meeting with the unstable and tragic Sebastian Flyte. Across the first year Ollie becomes a satellite of this clique as a result of he and Felix somewhat improbably becoming friends. He is mostly relegated to the margins of the group because of his thorny relationship with Farleigh, who turns out to be Felix’s cousin. Ollie opens up to Felix and shares details of his upbringing in Prescot, with abusive and addictive parents, and also reveals that his father has just died. Out of a sense of sympathy, and friendship, Felix invites Ollie to spend the summer with his family at their home, the titular Saltburn. The Brideshead connection is driven home even harder when Ollie arrives at the house for the summer. When he mentions Evelyn Waugh to Felix in passing, he’s told that the Marchmains were pretty much modelled on members of the family, and it’s something of a familial in-joke.
“Where’s Liverpool?”
To say that Ollie’s early moments at Saltburn are uncomfortable is probably underplaying things, especially when he accidentally overhears everyone discussing Felix’s latest “pet” just before he is introduced to them. It is also nicely comic when Felix gives Ollie the whistlestop tour of this massive house, in much the same way as you would showing a friend around a new semi you’ve just bought. Idly wandering up the stairs, Felix mentions, “and this is where I accidentally fingered my cousin …”, before moving on apace. It helps to remind us that, however weird and cavernous this space is to us, to him, it’s still his home.
For all that we have been initially encouraged to think in the Brideshead way, things are soon shown to be not quite that clear-cut. Felix isn’t the massively unstable disaster area that Sebastian was, looking instead like a generally amiable and decent, if carelessly privileged young man as time passes. He shows real compassion for Ollie when he’s told about his father’s death, and makes efforts to stick up for him in Oxford when others are much more ambivalent. At the same time, there are some initial hints that Ollie has some rather darker undercurrents, and there are worrying and obsessive turns to his behaviour, beginning in Oxford.
Ollie quickly insinuates himself into the Catton family party, who include Felix’s parents, Sir James and Lady Elspeth (Richard E Grant, and Rosamund Pike having a ball and, if not quite chewing the scenery, certainly giving it a more than thoughtful nibble), Felix’s sister Venetia, and Farleigh. Generally speaking, the more we see of the Cattons, the more unlikeable, sneering, and shallow they appear to be, Felix apart. Ollie’s confidence is increasing, and he and Elspeth seem also to be developing a growing closeness as the summer draws on.
This is where the “fun” begins. It’s fair to say that now Ollie begins to properly get his freak on. First he spies on Felix masturbating in the bath tub in the large shared bathroom they use, before … ahem ... “savouring” the bathwater he leaves behind. Later he happens upon Venetia out at night in the gardens, performing cunnilingus on her after she has explained she is on her period. He then goes on to seduce Farleigh in a scene more than passingly reminiscent of Frank ’n’ Furter’s advances on both Brad and Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Soon after this, Sir James expels Farleigh from the house after he is accused of trying to sell some valuable ceramics to a London auction house.
Having found out that Ollie’s birthday is towards the end of summer, Felix’s parents decide to throw a party in his honour. First however, Felix surprises Ollie by taking him on a mystery tour which turns out to be a journey back to Prescot to visit Ollie’s mother. As they approach, Ollie gets increasingly panicked and continually begs Felix to turn around. It becomes clear why. Felix is angry and hurt to discover that the version of his life that Ollie has presented is a total fabrication. Ollie’s mother is a pleasant, respectable middle-class woman, and she and his equally respectable and very much alive father are living a perfectly normal life in suburban Merseyside. Felix tells Ollie that, though he won’t share this upsetting discovery with his parents, after the party he wants him to leave Saltburn. When they do get back, he also spends most of the remaining time either ignoring or avoiding Ollie.
If what has gone before seems faintly shocking, the night of the party dials things up further. Ollie discovers Farleigh has crashed the party, and their encounter is a bitter one. Ollie also attempts to repair things with Felix, only to be finally and comprehensively rebuffed. The following morning though, Felix is discovered dead, appearing to have overdosed, and everything falls apart very quickly. There is a disturbing scene with Ollie following Felix’s funeral and burial. Afterwards Ollie hints that Farleigh may have supplied the fatal drugs to Felix, leading to Farleigh being disavowed and disinherited permanently by the Cattons. A grief-stricken Venetia accuses Oliver of being a malign influence, and is found dead soon after in what looks to be a very messy suicide. At this point Sir James becomes increasingly troubled by Ollie’s continued presence in the house, and by his increasing closeness to Elspeth, so he bribes the younger man to leave.
Cut to 2022. And in some nondescript London coffee shop, we see Ollie reading a newspaper, discovering Sir James is dead. And who should suddenly show up, but Lady Elspeth. They begin a relationship with Ollie returning to Saltburn with her, but soon Elspeth becomes ill, and dies. It’s only at this point that we learn the true sequence of events and just how much of a long game Ollie has been playing. All through the film, we have seen brief snatches of Ollie speaking in flashback, and finally he explains exactly what he has managed to do, and how.
Actually, as I was watching those little cut scenes, I kept thinking of Dennis Price as Louis Mazzini, sitting in his cell in Kind Hearts and Coronets, casually recounting how he’d managed to serially off the line of D’Ascoynes who stood before what he saw as his birthright. To throw that in as a cue was a subtle, but clever little misdirection, as it happens. But like Kind Hearts, the humour here is as black as it comes, probably even a little too black for some. There are also hints of the interloping social climber navigating the class wall from other films. The writer and director, Emerald Fennell cites The Go Between and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon as significant influences, though there are also clear traces of The Talented Mr Ripley too. You can see slightly Kubrick quality in the static, painting-like quality to some of the framing of shots of the house and the exteriors. It’s all very stately. This isn’t a criticism: it shows off the house beautifully, and reinforces just how rarefied, and perhaps even suffocating an environment is being inhabited by these mostly quite unpleasant people. You do wonder what effect it must have on them psychologically. But it was also pointed out to me there’s yet another point of reference here: Ollie is very much like the scheming Steerpike in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, plotting his way to a final decisive position of power.³ The big difference here is that, unlike those other works, there’s no redemption, retribution or twist, no face off, no damning confession left sitting on the table in the condemned cell. Ollie wins. Even though he has started out as the underdog, and almost everyone else he comes into contact with, both at Oxford and Saltburn, is quite monumentally hateful, you cannot help but think his victory leaves a nasty taste in the mouth because he has become every bit as awful as the rest of them were, or almost certainly even worse. Or perhaps he was all along. Maybe after all this, that’s the sad moral for our times the film lays on us: sometimes bad deeds really do go unpunished, and bastards can, and do, triumph.
¹ I thought it was the right time to watch it now. It will not be long before I bin off Prime Video (and maybe even Prime in its entirety) for Amazon’s gouging enshittification, asking for what amounts to protection money to prevent ads on the ad free subscription service you’ve already paid for. After 5 Feb they can, to put it in the succinct way so beloved of the esteemed city of Glasgow, get tae fuck.
² It’s a view with which I have a passing personal familiarity, having gone for interview there back in November 1987. The walk in through the front gate, the quad, and the dining room were things I recognised instantly. And, for any number of reasons, I still look back on that experience not as a rejection, but very much a bullet dodged. I was not taken with Oxford.
³ You might even throw in a bit of Dickens’ Uriah Heep in there too.
