PRIME VIDEO - ON DEMAND - FILM
His name is Oliver Quick. At the start of the 2006 academic year, he arrives at Oxford wearing a sweater and a tie around his neck. His fellow students, who are dressed like 1960s rock stars or NBA players, mercilessly mock his attire and posture.
In the quaint intimacy of the room where his tutor initiates him into the arcana of English literature, Oliver (Barry Keoghan) meets Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe), the less fortunate member of an aristocratic constellation whose major star is Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). But we already know that this Dickensian situation is only a decoy, that Saltburn is about to leave the path of the social chronicle to plunge into the murky waters of desire and the unconscious. No one emerges from this plunge unscathed, neither the characters nor the audience. Neither will the film, which emerges as fascinating but mutilated by its director's contradictory impulses.
Before Saltburn, Emerald Fennell's second feature film after Promising Young Woman (2020), began in earnest. Oliver, a little aged, grown-up, has been speaking to an unknown caller, detailing his feelings for Felix at the time. It was love, well almost. Before we meet the poor young man barely out of his teens, we already know that he contains within him the material needed to build the self-confident, vaguely disturbing adult we discover at the curtain-raiser.
In any case, Oliver is not a very reliable narrator. At Oxford, he presents himself as the scion of a more than dysfunctional family, ravaged by addictions and poverty. This marginality, combined with a good deed wisely done for Felix Catton, enables him to arouse the young man's compassion and – perhaps – affection.
By the time the 2007 summer vacations arrive, the friendship between the two young men has already cracked, a victim of sudden mood swings arising from the gulf between their social classes. The news of Oliver's father's death prompts Felix to ignore the latter and invite his fellow student to spend the summer at the family home, Saltburn.
Saltburn isn't just any English manor house (it'll turn up in Northamptonshire guidebooks as Drayton House). A labyrinthine edifice to which successive generations have added elements of contradictory styles, from Gothic to neoclassical, Saltburn is a monstrous caricature of the manor houses that have made British productions from Kind Hearts and Coronets to Downton Abbey so successful.
Its occupants – Felix's parents (Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant), his catatonic sister (Alison Oliver) and the family friend who can't be made to understand that she should have left long ago (Carey Mulligan) – are also monstrous versions of the aristocrats we've become accustomed to seeing more or less benevolently reigning over their estates. Rosamund Pike brings all her acting brilliance to bear on a character who crystallizes centuries of social imbecility. As for Richard E. Grant, he gives the impression of a desperate being, trapped in a condition too enviable to escape.
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