Saltburn (2023)

Emerald Fennell's second feature arrives dressed in 2006 period styling and a 4:3 frame, as though we were peering through a keyhole at somebody else's very expensive summer. The target is the British landed class, and the film takes obvious pleasure in watching a scholarship boy dismantle it from within. This is a satire of inherited money, and it is a good one, though it complicates the usual reading by making the infiltrator the genuine monster. The aristocrats are frivolous and cruel; the outsider is patient and lethal. Sympathy is not distributed where we expect it.

Queer desire runs through the whole thing. Oliver's fixation on Felix is the engine, and the film's most discussed sequence involves a bathtub and a lack of restraint. The material is deployed for transgression, not advocacy, which is its own kind of honesty. Archie Madekwe's Farleigh supplies the only real diversity in an otherwise very white cast, and his marginalization is framed through money and class, with race left as an implication the film never picks up. Fennell writes and directs, though the film advances no argument about women; Venetia exists mostly to be undone.

There is no environmental sermon here, no body-positive message, no neurodivergent representation, no rewriting of history. The class anger is real but muddled, since the film refuses to tell us whom to root for. It is preachy about nothing, which is refreshing and also slightly empty. A handsomely mounted provocation, best enjoyed the way its characters enjoy everything: greedily, and without much thought for tomorrow.