Movie Review: Saltburn

At only 31 years old, Irish actor Barry Keoghan has quickly shown himself to be one of the most consistently great performers working today. Whether appearing in sprawling, effects-laden epics like Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Chloé Zhao’s Eternals, outré arthouse fare like Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer and David Lowery’s The Green Knight, or perhaps most notably Martin McDonagh’s small scale black comedy The Banshees of Inisherin, he continues to impress and steals every scene he is in. The trend continues in Emerald Fennell’s psychosexual comic-drama Saltburn.

Keoghan is riveting as Oliver Quick, a scholarship student at Oxford who becomes obsessed with classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, appropriately charming), whose family rank amongst Britain’s wealthiest. When the pair finally meet, Oliver’s sad story of growing up with mentally ill and drug addicted parents elicits feelings of sympathy from Felix, who eventually invites his struggling young friend to join him at his family’s sprawling country estate for the Summer. Oliver is instantly enamored by the lavish lifestyle the Cattons live, surrounded by expensive works of art and attended to by a large staff.

Felix’s cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), mother Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and father Sir James (Richard E. Grant), all live their lives in an oblivious haze, idly drinking the days away and using other people for their own amusement, almost completely out of touch with the real world. Watching the banter amongst them is one of the film’s comic highlights, with Pike’s Elspeth in particular getting some truly funny lines, and it is made quickly clear that they are not very good people. Not all is as at seems however, and the script begins to make us wonder just what Felix’s real goal in inviting Oliver might be and likewise what Oliver’s goal in visiting the Cattons might be.

In only her second feature as writer and director after Promising Young Woman, Fennell is proving herself to have a distinct style that lines up pretty well with my tastes. She has a keen sense of humor and is very adept at blending it into stories that take some very dark turns. Smart musical cues and striking cinematography enhance the atmosphere, but it is really the excellent cast that makes this material shine. This could have been a straightforward tear down of England’s aloof upper classes, but Oliver, Grant, Elordi, and especially Pike remind us that for all their faults, there are still vulnerable people under the shiny veneer. Saltburn is above all else a star-turn for Keoghan however, who ably switches between Oliver’s different emotional states and keeps us wondering if he is a character to be pitied or feared. Thrillingly twisted, Saltburn is a movie that viewers won’t soon forget. ★★★★★