Emerald Fennell: “Saltburn”: Circus Sockshot

Oliver Quick walks across the Oxford campus like a slightly disturbed incarnation of Harry Potter. Shoulders hunched, boyish face, clothes inconspicuous, a pass for every average Bulli. But also highly intelligent. Barry Keoghan plays the antihero in Emerald Fennell’s second film “Saltburn” as a slightly pitiful, but also inscrutable, latently threatening figure. The student version of his psychopathic family destroyer from “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” so to speak. The ambivalence of weakness and underlying violence is only resolved in the final plot twist.

Oliver manages to build a friendship with the noble womanizer Felix (Jacob Elordi). His lower-class riser narrative is the key to the heart of the upper class (if there is such a thing): the parents are drug addicts, hardly any contact anymore, the father dies of a drink during the first semester, but the son is highly gifted and has an Oxford scholarship. Felix takes Oliver to the family estate for a summer. That’s where things get decadent and bizarre and eccentric. All of them have a mild to moderate sore throat and are at least psychologically stressed, but are untouchable due to their background and money. Sock shot plus fool’s freedom: “Saltburn” is most fun when he just lets his characters do their thing.

Fennell deliberately leaves it unclear what direction the film will take. “Saltburn” fluctuates between comedy, drama and erotic thriller. This works very well, at least in the first half, because the film happily gets lost in genre references and other references and doesn’t even try to tell a plausible story. The focus is on individual scenes, each designed for maximum effect and only loosely connected to each other narratively.

The revenge of those left behind on those who were given everything at birth is always beautiful to see on screen. And “Saltburn” could have been something like the definitive eat-the-rich film: an enchanting cast, a script by Fennell herself, who made a darkly funny and depressing directorial debut with “Promising Young Woman,” and the free-floating camera by Linus Sandgren (“La La Land”, “Babylon”) and a great soundtrack. So basically everything is there in terms of requirements.

Unfortunately it doesn’t really work. Somehow the film feels like it has to tell a story that should be just as spectacular as the sex scenes (including fellatio with menstrual blood, masturbation on a freshly filled grave). However, the hooks that the script hits are so carelessly thrown together that nothing really gets off the ground. You can’t plausibly reconstruct it without giving spoilers. Just this much: The fact that the question of origin is not so clearly presented is still a nice twist, even if it takes away the class struggle élan of “Saltburn”. From that point on in the story, everything is somehow possible and it doesn’t really matter.

It’s not boring, everything here is too aesthetically pretty to be boring, and the characters are too funny, too beautiful or too strange (or all at the same time). But it’s noticeable that, despite all the effort on all levels, nothing really fits together and the film doesn’t really know where to go. Which then doesn’t create a pleasant confusion, but rather the impression of stale indifference.

Instead, the action moves from one Tiktok-ready moment to the next. Some of these moments were scandalized after the premiere. The excitement when you see it doesn’t really reveal itself. Die Welt even thought it had seen the “most controversial film of the year.” When things supposedly get controversial, “Saltburn” calms down and concentrates on the essentials. As if the actual core of the whole company lay here.

For example, when Oliver drinks the water from the tub in which Felix had just masturbated and licks the drain, a picture emerges in which eroticism, kinkiness, disgust and a few other things are related to class differences have to do, mix in the most beautiful way. It’s not scandalous, but it’s a shame that “Saltburn” ultimately doesn’t know how to make much of all that it has to offer.

»Saltburn«: USA 2023. Director: Emerald Fennell. Starring: Barry Keoghan, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan. 127 minutes, available on Amazon Prime.

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