"Saltburn" is the Worst Film of 2023. Here's Why.
Emerald Fennell's follow-up to 2020's "Promising Young Woman" is a psychopathic playground of sexual schadenfreude.
Emerald Fennell is in the business of controversy. Her first film, 2020’s Promising Young Woman, was a firebomb of a #MeToo rape-revenge tale that lit the film world afire. It was a polemic against rape culture with a pessimistic philosophy: that men are intrinsically toxic creatures (even Bo Burnham!), and that women are justified in pursuing violent retribution against them. (This is a film in which Carey Mulligan pretends to be a stripper so that she can torture Chris Lowell, after all.) The movie is flawed. It has a number of script issues, with an ideology doesn’t entirely hold up under cinematic scrutiny. But its messaging and attitude felt entirely urgent at its time of release: an exhilarating social document for a world still reeling from the shocks of a post-Weinstein world.
Saltburn, Fennell’s second feature film in the director’s seat, shares evident DNA with its predecessor. Both films have luminous visual sensibilities: They possess a colorful vibrancy that wrench you into their irony-laden storyworlds. They both satirize systems of power: Where Promising Young Woman tackled the ramifications of male violence, Saltburn focuses on the absurdity of the English class system. And, perhaps most importantly, both films understand the world entirely through the lens of desire. In an interview with AnOther Magazine, Fennell herself observed how she is “always going to be interested in sex and power at the centre of everything,” and how these two forces are not just her preferred subject, but “the central tensions of all drama. Whether it’s the dynamics between men and women, or between the class system—that’s going to be fascinating forever.”
Among the many problems with Saltburn—a film so extravagantly terrible, it can sometimes be hard to put into words—most of them can be boiled down to the totality implied in that quote. By stating that sex and power are “the central tensions of all drama,” Fennell single-handedly implies that love, joy, sadness, fear, or any other emotional state are somehow non-factors in driving a plot forward. That’s an almost unbearably stupid point to make, so to refute it, I’ll just throw out the casual reminder that two of the year’s biggest movies were centered on 1) a scientist contemplating the morality of his own technological creation, and 2) a Barbie doll finding self-actualization in gynecology. The central tensions of those films didn’t come from sex and power, but existential self-reflection.
Again, that’s a blindingly obvious point to make. But for Saltburn—a film that exemplifies Fennell’s “sex is everything” philosophy in its repulsive entirety—the obvious needs to be stated. Fennell sees the human experience extending no further than to the end of Barry Keoghan’s naked shaft, flopping aimlessly inside an English summer palace to the tune of “Murder on the Dancefloor.” This is the reason that Saltburn is such an overwhelming failure, and whose infuriating tendencies I can’t get out of my head more than a full two months after I first saw it.
The (Many) Failures of Saltburn
“I loved him,” intones Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), desirous protagonist of Saltburn, in the film’s opening montage. “But was I in love with him?” The person in question is Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a pretty-boy posho from an unreasonably high-class English family, and the film’s resident Hot Boy. The particularity of the question—of the line between loving a charismatic upper-cruster and being in love with him—also tells you all you need to know about Oliver, a middle-class scholarship student entering his first year at Oxford University. Early on he recognizes that Felix offers access into the school’s wealthier social circles, and likewise develops a not-quite platonic crush on him early on. Who wouldn’t? With his imposing height (Elordi is six-foot-five), charming naïveté, and sexy little eyebrow stud, Felix is the center of Oxford’s undergraduate social life. And Oliver, a wannabe schemer, is instantly attracted.
The problem for Oliver is that his chances of interacting with Felix—or any of the poshos, for that matter—is next to zero. Oliver is a “scholarship boy,” a term used derisively by the school’s wealth-inheriting inbreds to keep his friendships limited to nerds expecting applause whenever they solve complex math problems out loud. So when Oliver one day sees Felix lying on the side of the road, late to class with a flat bike tire, he seizes the moment. Oliver offers to swap bikes with Felix for the day, knowing that it will spark Felix’s endless gratitude. So begins a new friendship—a frienship which for Oliver doubles as a class-based sexual awakening.
This is about where the film begins flying off the rails, so I should note here that Saltburn is entertaining up to this point. Fennell’s penchant for aestheticism is well-suited to the satirical goals of these early moments, especially as it relates to Oliver and Felix’s relationship. She directs their scenes with ebullient charm—their respective class anxieties conflict with each other in entirely believable ways. It’s fun to watch Oliver pick on Felix’s insecurities in the manner of an insecure girlfriend, or to watch him play up his own impoverished past with the intention of keeping Felix sympathetic. It also suggests a mildly compelling (if unsophisticated) ambiguity, around which a superior film might have revolved: Is Oliver genuinely interested in Felix, or is it mere middle-class jealousy?
Oliver’s sympathetic pleas work wonders—likely because Felix’s height and confidence belie his emotional neediness. He recounts his tragic origin story to Felix just as they are about to complete their first year of undergrad: a tale about his home back in the North, with a father who died from a drug overdose and a mother who continues to abuse them. Felix sympathizes (in a manner that recalls the “They’re nice because their rich!” attitude of Parasite’s Park family) and decides to extend his friend an olive branch. Rather than have Oliver spend the summer in a broken home, Felix invites him to stay at Saltburn: the Catton family’s sprawling, gothic, and oh-so-English estate.
Unfortunately, Saltburn is also the reason that Saltburn collapses. This is where we meet Felix’s despicable family: the Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), Felix’s mother, catty and paranoid; Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Felix’s father, who doesn’t care to hear about anyone’s feelings, least of all Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a cousin who is also staying with them for the summer; and Venetia (Alison Oliver), Felix’s sister, seeking attention from a family that evidently sees her brother as a golden child. There is also “Poor Dear” Pamela (Carey Mulligan), a struggling family friend who has overstayed her welcome, and Duncan (Paul Rhys), Saltburn’s imposing butler. Each of these characters are well-constructed and rigorously performed—Grant and Pike have a particular command over their snobbery. But the film’s script continually places them in situations that have less to do with character than Fennell’s obsession with scandalous imagery. No sooner does Oliver unpack his suitcase than does he procedurally seduce each member of the family. He meets Venetia on a moonlit night, consuming her bodily fluids in a let’s-not-even-pretend-to-be-subtle act of sexual vampirism. He ingratiates Lady Elspeth, this time using his words rather than his penis. He all but assaults Farleigh; their petty jealousy over Felix’s attention puts them at odds. (It should be noted that Farleigh is the worst character in the film; the poorly-written part does Archie Madekwe no favors.)
Why, exactly, does Oliver seduce everyone in the house like an economically anxious Don Juan? The film suggests that Oliver has discovered his sexuality as a multipurpose tool to wield around the Catton home. He is excited at the prospect of using his newfound penis prowess isolate Felix from potential suitors. But this isn’t the real reason, which is itself far less interesting: Fennell just wants you to gasp. She wants pry open the mouths of her audience, nail their jaws to the floor, and hold them against their will for the film’s 131-minute runtime. That’s as shallow as it sounds. In one sequence, we watch Oliver sneak a peek at Felix masturbating in the bathtub; after Felix leaves, Oliver puts his mouth near the drain and slurps up the semen-stained bathwater before it can swirl away. In another, we witness a besotted Oliver stick his cock into a freshly-dug grave, crying as he humps the wet dirt.
I can to some degree admire Fennell’s full-on commitment to indecency, particularly as it relates to the English class system. They’re a fun target to pick on, after all—it’s easy to find mischievous titillation in tearing down systems of wealth. But mischief can only take you so far. Without purpose in all the disgust, Saltburn’s manipulative tendencies are revealed for what they are: hateful and disinterested, driven to sending the audience into a state of aghast stupefaction.
The Moral Repugnancy of Saltburn
(Note: Spoilers for the remainder of Saltburn to follow)
Watching Saltburn, I couldn’t help but think of last year’s Triangle of Sadness, another eat-the-rich satire which likewise imploded in a second act that was consumed by its own vulgarity. This was a film which believed it could elevate a thirty-minute sequence of vomiting billionaires into high art. It was convinced that pure craftsmanship could transcend the norms of gross-out comedy, and, despite some genuinely incisive insights about class and capitalism, it couldn’t. The film never quite removes the stench of human bile from its high-minded satire.
Triangle of Sadness is a mess of a film, but it is forgivably messy, largely because writer-director Ruben Östlund had a vision and intentionality with which he never once broke. In an onstage interview with the AFI, Östlund remarked how he wanted the vomit sequence in particular to go “ten steps further than the audience expects me to do.” His reasoning is simple: “Vomiting in films…is kind of childish. If you only do only a little bit, it’s going to be silly. And if you do it a little bit more, it’s going to be tasteless. But my idea was: there’s something on the other side of the tastelessness that is going to be a metaphor for where we are in society.” Östlund was wrong: Triangle of Sandess never finds “the other side of tastelessness” as he had hoped. But what he did have was a vision—a guiding principle that informed each and every one of his barf-based decisions. He was searching for meaning in disgust, and although he never found it, there is something to be admired in his pursuit.
Saltburn, on the other hand, has no vision whatsoever. The film would have you believe that there is some meaning in Oliver preying upon each member of the Catton family, that there is significance in his cross-eyed consumption of masturbation bathwater. Peer even slightly behind the curtain and you’ll find that there’s nothing to them: empty provocations designed to clinically extract gasps out of the audience’s already-gaping mouths. Saltburn performs these provocations relentlessly, turning a fundamentally compelling idea—satirizing the English class system through a prism of sexual obsession—into an utterly exhausting experience.
Saltburn isn’t simply a bad film, but an abhorrent one. It is possessed of a pervasive need to reduce humanity to their animal desires, which is a shame, because Fennell has a knack for composing her scenes with real verve. There is a fascinating sequence midway through the film in which Felix surprises Oliver on his birthday by taking him to his parents’ home. It is staged brilliantly. On the drive there, Oliver begs Felix to turn back, leaving the audience in eager anticipation about discovering Oliver’s reportedly impoverished home life. But as it turns out, Oliver was raised in middle-class normalcy. His parents are kind and doting; he grew up in a three-bedroom household in a boring neighborhood. There is no poverty or drug addiction to speak of. Oliver was lying about his impoverished upbringing this entire time, leaving Felix furious and Oliver crushed. This is the film’s best scene, elevated by the genuinely interesting question of whether Oliver’s obsession with Felix is the result of quotidian middle-class envy, or simply his uniquely sociopathic sexuality. It helps that Keoghan, perhaps the most impenetrable young actor working today, possesses one of the most inscrutable faces in cinema—the perfect foil to Elordi’s charming readability.
But Keoghan’s innate ambiguity can’t save a film without an interest in sustaining it, and the film’s utterly catastrophic ending flattens whatever ideas are left over by the time Saltburn reaches its end. Ideas about social mobility and how they intersect with various forms of sexual desire; ideas about its protagonist, who tumbles into the world of the uber-rich like a Less-than-Talented Mr. Ripley—they all get tossed unceremoniously out the window after Oliver and Felix’s troubling encounter with Oliver’s parents. That night, Felix’s parents hold a raucous birthday bash held for Oliver at Saltburn, and—following a terse confrontation late into the night between the two friends—Felix is found dead in the pool. There’s a mourning period with some incredibly English proceduralism, in turn sparking Saltburn (and Saltburn’s) slow demise. Everyone—Farleigh, Venetia, Sir James, and Lady Elspeth—ends up leaving the manor in the coming days and years. Farleigh is kicked out of the house. Venetia commits suicide. Years later, Sir James dies of natural causes; Lady Elspeth falls ill shortly after. And then, in a narrative turnaround sudden enough to make you vomit out of pure whiplash, Oliver reveals the stupidest plot twist of recent memory: Oliver had been plotting to befriend, ingratiate, and rob the Catton family of their wealth from the very beginning. Remember the bike with the flat tire that sparked Oliver and Felix’s meet-cute? Turns out that Oliver punctured it in order to force their first interaction. That time that Oliver didn’t have enough money to buy drinks at the bar, but then Felix swooped in to save him? Oliver had plenty of money; he just wanted Felix to feel like a savior.
It’s all incoherently reductive, but just in case that wasn’t enough, Fennell reveals that Oliver has also murdered everyone in the house. He poisoned Felix on the night of his death. He planted incriminating evidence leading to Farleigh’s ejection. He slit Venetia’s wrists, then framed her for suicide. In the film’s extravagantly stupid coup de grâce, he rips out Lady Elspeth’s life support from her throat just after she bequeaths him Saltburn in her will.
Never mind that this ending reduces all its themes of class, desire, and jealousy down to the shallowest possible conclusion (“Oliver is just a psychopath”), nor that his magical transformation from nervous first-year student to scheming sexual deviant is a textbook example of provocation without meaning. (How we are expected to believe that Oliver’s schoolboy interest in Felix could evolve into sociopathic obsession by the time he arrives at Saltburn, much less to the murderous incoherence that it turns to at the film’s end, is a screenwriting decision that will forever be beyond me). Ignore all that, and we remain left with an ending which suggests that all human behavior is the product of lust. In the storyworld of Saltburn, each and every decision we make is the result of sexual or economic desire, which Fennell believes are themselves wholly intertwined.
It’s all at such a distance from any truth I am able to recognize that I find myself aghast. I am repulsed Fennell’s hatred towards human nature; I am disgusted at her willingness to laugh so squarely in its face. The film spends most of its runtime demonizing the Catton family, and while it’s hard to blame her—again, the uber-rich are easy targets—it’s no less horrible to watch someone make a film with such clear disdain for the human condition. Saltburn is a comedy of cynicism, and it’s repugnant.
The worst films are not the worst-made films. Poor craftsmanship is a problem, but it can be excused. No, the worst films are instead those are not just poorly-made, but made with poor intentions. The reason that I hate Saltburn is not because it is overflowing with screenwriting problems and incoherent characters (though it most certainly is), but because these issues are the direct result of a filmmaker intent on splashing in a playground of sexual schadenfreude.
When Fennell burst onto the scene in 2020 with Promising Young Woman, it was an exciting moment. Here was a filmmaker with vision. She possessed an eye-catching visual sensibility, and she used it to resonant cinematic ends. She picked great performers for her roles and knew how to coax out their most incisive particularities. (To her credit, she still does.) She had some screenwriting problems—some themes that didn’t totally match up with her intentions. But those could be worked out later. There was more than enough talent to forgive a few hiccups.
With Saltburn, it appears that those hiccups may actually be her defining feature. Rather than move away from the shock-tactic absurdity that plagued her previous film, she instead veers straight into it, resulting in a car crash of a film with multiple victims. The promise of this film was immense. Fennell picked the perfect cast for what could have been a Succession-style blend of tragedy and raucous humor. She fills her frames with sumptuous colors, usually tinged with a transfixingly desirous red. She also knows just when to drop in a perfectly-timed music cue, the best of which comes in the film’s final scene, when Oliver dances naked through Saltburn to the tune of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.” There’s some thrilling virtuosity on display in this setpiece: a tracking shot follows the naked Keoghan all through the house as he celebrates his wealth-acquiring murder spree.
But behind all the virtuosity lies the most insidious feeling: that Fennell is celebrating too. She has no love for her characters. She just wants to watch them burn.
Thank you for this fine review. I too was repulsed by the film. It revels in the psycho's sadistic destruction of these people without adequate literary compensations.
I do think there's a point, however. This is an eat-the-rich (literally, sort of) and fuck-their-graves fantasy. I imagine a director's cut where Oliver fucks the dead mom. Seemed like it was about to go there; in any case, that's the obvious sentiment as he flamboyantly murders her by ripping out the tube with cinematic flourish before crawling up her body. Nice.
Now, granted, these people aren't real. Well, Felix is. (So is, I'd say, Farleigh, actually.) The rest are ludicrous cartoons. That goes for Oliver too, who represents not a plausible person but an adolescent idea -- that the world is run, circa 2002, by PBS-ish aristocrats with butlers and footmen who richly deserve a good plundering for the sin of dressing for dinner.
For all the movie's purported naughtiness, the erotic sensibility is glib and depressing. Sex = fucking = destroying. Note the paucity of actual sex. Note the mockery of parents losing their children. Note, indeed, the absence of, as you point out, humanity. We're fooled in the early going, and even after the first big twist, into believing that Oliver is, as Farleigh puts it, a "real boy." Silly us. He's a moth, as Venetia says, but that's shallow and tedious, especially where we get the sense that we're supposed to be on the moth's side.
so many words to be so wrong lol also so wrong about promising young woman it’s a sad story of a traumatized woman trying to heal herself in all the wrong ways and the ending shows how wrong and dangerous her method was it’s not a story to be celebrated or replicated and it doesn’t try to be