The Pitch: It’s 2006: MGMT plays on the radio, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest tears up the box office, and young Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) arrives at Oxford to begin his studies. He’s shy, awkward, unassuming; while the rich kids party and carouse around him, the unconnected “scholarship kid” gets stuck on the NFI list: Not. Fucking. Invited.
Still, fortune smiles on him, and so does Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the ravishing young prince of the Oxford party scene. For one reason or another, he takes a shine to Oliver — is it real friendship? Is it pity? Charity? The audience’s guess is as good as anyone’s. Since Oliver’s tales of home are full of weary and woe, Felix offers to let him crash at his family’s prewar palatial estate, Saltburn. There, he finds himself living and partying among Felix’s clan, including his father (Richard E. Grant), mother (Rosamund Pike), and sister Alison Oliver), as well as the various contemporaries and hangers-on that surround the golden boy (like Archie Madekwe’s Farleigh, Felix’s previous bestie and the one person who smells something off about Oliver).
Amid the glitz, glamour, and sex of Saltburn, with its expansive courtyards and hedge mazes littered with G-strings, confetti, and champagne bottles, Oliver struggles to maintain his place in the pecking order. Does Felix return Oliver’s infatuation, or does the object of his affection see him, in turn, as yet another plaything?
Time to Pretend: Much like Emerald Fennell’s 2020 debut Promising Young Woman (a scathing yet hollow takedown of rape culture that nonetheless won Fennell an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay), Saltburn feels like a dizzying clash of old and new, a provocative jab in the eye of good taste that revels in the nastiness of its characters to reveal the darker parts of ourselves and the society that builds us.
Or, at least, that’s what it gestures toward on the surface; try as it might to land some deeper satirical blows, Saltburn feels an uneven gumbo of Brideshead Revisited, Euphoria, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and an American Apparel commercial.
But what glorious, alluring surface it is: A young, sexy cast of the UK’s finest (and we do mean finest) up-and-coming (and we do mean coming) stars, playing psychosexual mind games with each other and engaging in deranged erotic play in front of Linus Sandgren’s moody 35mm lens.
Saltburn (Amazon MGM Studios)
