Rating: 8.5/10 | Director: Emerald Fennell | Runtime: 127 min | Released: November 2023

Emerald Fennell’s first film, Promising Young Woman, announced someone with a precise and unsettling sensibility. Saltburn confirms it. This is a film about class, obsession, and the specific violence of desire, wrapped in a surface so seductive that you are well into the film before you understand what it is actually doing to you.

The Setup

Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) arrives at Oxford as a scholarship student from a difficult background and immediately falls into the orbit of Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), rich, beautiful, and genuinely kind in a way that makes him either naive or cruel depending on your reading. When Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s English country estate, Oliver accepts. What follows is a slow, patient, aesthetically beautiful game of social predation.

The film is structured as a series of reveals. Fennell withholds key information early in ways that make you reassess scenes you thought you understood, and she trusts her audience to do that work without being guided. By the final third, what looked like a film about outsider longing has become something altogether darker, and Fennell holds it together without ever letting the tonal shifts feel ungainly.

The Performances

Barry Keoghan is extraordinary. He has built a career on roles that require the audience to feel sympathy and discomfort simultaneously, and Oliver Quick is the fullest expression of that skill. He is readable and opaque at once: you watch him watching Felix and you cannot quite tell whether what you are seeing is longing, calculation, or both. The ambiguity is the performance, and it holds across the entire film.

Jacob Elordi has the more difficult role because Felix has to be convincingly good to make the film’s moral architecture work. An obvious villain would flatten everything. Elordi plays Felix as someone with genuine warmth who simply has no frame of reference for the kind of hunger Oliver brings to Saltburn, and that limitation, not cruelty, is what makes Felix ultimately tragic.

Rosamund Pike as Felix’s mother Elspeth steals every scene she is in, delivering perfectly timed lines with the casual confidence of someone who has never had to consider whether she is funny or not.

The Film’s Argument

Fennell is making a film about the English class system through the genre of a Gothic thriller, and the combination works better than it should. Saltburn the house is as much a character as anyone in it: its corridors, gardens, and formal rooms are filmed by Linus Sandgren with a beauty that is deliberately intoxicating. The film wants you to understand why someone from outside might want this world enough to do terrible things to get it. It succeeds.

Some viewers have found the ending provocative in ways that feel empty. I don’t agree. The final scene is precisely as dark as the logic of the film requires, and Fennell lands it with the same deadpan confidence she brings to the rest of the film. Saltburn is not a comfortable experience, and it does not pretend otherwise.