Is Saltburn Stupid in a Good Way or a Bad Way?

Emerald Fennell’s latest is either a preening, cynical film that’s far less clever than it thinks it is, or a delightfully indulgent mess.

This article was originally published on November 17. We are recirculating it now timed to Saltburn’s streaming debut on Prime Video. (Be sure to also read Alison Willmore’s review of the film, our interviews with the bathtub scene’s foley artist and the final dance scene’s choreographer, and Roxana Hadadi’s analysis of the ending.) Also, a warning: this post spoils pretty much everything about the movie.

Much like the elite spheres of English academia, Vulture is riven with an internal divide. Ours is over Saltburn, the second film by Promising Young Woman’s Emerald Fennell, which mashes up Brideshead Revisited, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and some old semen-stained issues of A&F Quarterly. Since premiering at Telluride over Labor Day weekend, the movie has polarized the film community, including our own staff, half of which find the film Fennell’s Neon Bible; the other half think it’s more her Sam’s Town. As is our wont, we’ve convened a discussion group to hash it all out, featuring one hater who won’t stop mentioning that he’s an actual British citizen and one lover who read a lot of Harry Potter fanfic, which is basically the same thing.

Nate Jones: When I was at college in the mid-aughts, I worshiped at the altar of the Ralph Lauren Rugby store on University Place, which is to say I am pretty much the target audience for Saltburn. And yet, despite the presence of actors I enjoy and plenty of eyebrow-raising set pieces, I was strangely unengaged. By the closing scenes, I found it a preening, cynical film that was far less clever than it thinks it is. But since that’s close to the emerging critical consensus, my own opinion is much less interesting to me than those of the vocal pro-Saltburn contingent. Pray tell me, what do you see here that I’m missing?

Emily Palmer Heller: I don’t disagree that it’s a supremely cynical film. It’s mean and nasty and obnoxious. That didn’t turn me off, though! I like when a movie can make me go, “Oh no, don’t do THAT,” which I did several times during Saltburn, particularly during those set pieces. The scene where Barry Keoghan’s Oliver Quick rims the tub drain containing his frenemy Felix Catton’s (Jacob Elordi) jizz and bathwater made my skin crawl — and I liked it! I had so much fun just waiting to see how icky this movie was going to make me feel next. I’m also an apologist for the Promising Young Woman ending, which I would argue intentionally leaves audiences feeling queasy about its heroine’s fate, so I was already coming in a little defensive. So let’s talk about the ending of Saltburn. I think it was a mess but an entertaining mess. Did you really not enjoy Barry Keoghan dancing naked around a decaying old manor?

NJ: Amazingly, I did not. The scene where Keoghan slurps the cummy bathwater, the scene where he earns his red wings going down on his crush’s sister, the scene where he humps a grave for a duration that recalls Rooney Mara and that pie — it all felt calculated, provocation for provocation’s sake. But I respected that at least it was also a little risky. The naked dance scene, however? It felt like the movie was elbowing me, going, “Whoa, can you believe I’m doing this?” when the this is something that’s been done many times before. Ex Machina was eight years ago; if you’re trying to wow me by having a character break into a dance out of nowhere, it’s got to be pretty spectacular. With apologies to Barry Keoghan’s admittedly ripped bod, this one wasn’t.

Perhaps I was already primed for player-hating, though, as the dance comes immediately after the actual most controversial scene, when the movie pulls back the curtain to reveal that Keoghan’s Quick had been orchestrating the aristocratic Catton family’s demise the entire time. Our hero has gotten away with multiple murders, a twist that somehow manages to be both stupid and obvious at the same time.

EPH: I will defend this as not so much a “twist” but an inevitable conclusion that is also, yes, stupid. But in a good way! I like when a director seems to make fun of me for ever thinking their film would turn out to be something different. Roast me, Emerald! I didn’t care for how Oliver’s plan was conveyed in a full murder-mystery-style flashback — I’d always rather figure things out myself, even if it takes a second watch to notice a detail — but the revelation that Quick isn’t a semi-justified anti-hero, just a jealous psychopath, made me cackle. Especially since we’ve had so many watered-down eat-the-rich stories lately (see last year’s lineup: The Menu, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story, and Triangle of Sadness), I liked that this one took that theme into a warped, fun-house-mirror direction.

I also just enjoy when I get to feel smart for figuring out what’s happening a few minutes before it happens. I loved when Felix said he was going to take Oliver to see his mom for his birthday and, as they pull up to a nice middle-class house, I got to sit with the thought, Ohhhhh, he lied about his parents, huh? It fires off my monkey brain in a very satisfying way.

The movie’s also got great vibes that feel so specific to 2006–7, which is an era that we’re just now starting to see in grown-up millennials’ nostalgic art. Jacob Elordi’s eyebrow ring, everyone reading Harry Potter at different points during the summer, the Arcade Fire–heavy soundtrack. It’s like looking back on a much cooler version of that era but also one that feels more sinister (because I wasn’t rich or British in 2006). How do you feel about its merits as a mid-aughts period piece?

NJ: Great vibes, beautiful vibes. Our colleague Alison Willmore declared Fennell “great at montages and terrible at endings,” and that’s generally where I stand with her. When she’s making her own Bloc Party or MGMT music video, the movie sings; it brought me back not to my actual life in 2006 but my idealized dream life (which was heavily inspired by the music videos playing in the American Eagle store I spent the summer working at). However, this gets into one of my little bugbears: A lot of the pop-culture ephemera in the film didn’t come out until later in the decade. The Cattons are seen watching an August 2007 release (Superbad) on television, for example. That felt lazy, which is a kiss of death when you’re also trying to be daring. If you want to set a film in the general era of “indie sleaze,” that’s fine … but don’t play Flo Rida’s “Low” and tell me it’s specifically 2006.

Still, on the subject of positives, everything looks fantastic. Fennell and DP Linus Sandgren make every frame a striking image, and in a year where even some of the big Oscar contenders look like they were shot for TV, that’s not nothing. If the movie was a coffee-table book, I’d love it. And you mention the mid-film revelation that Quick is not the downtrodden working-class lad he’s been posing as, just a boring middle-class normie. That was actually my favorite part — the one time it felt like Fennell had something interesting to say about class.

But I think that’s why I think Saltburn ultimately feels confused. The film’s been marketed as Fennell’s “eat the rich” satire, but she doesn’t hate these foolish aristocrats; she loves them. She loves their clothes, she loves their houses, she even loves their diffidence. By the end, they’re the only sympathetic characters. Which is fine — a lot of people in Britain secretly feel that way. I just wish she wasn’t fated to pretend.