Only Castles Burning

Three years after the year of no movies, 2020, Emerald Fennell returns with her second feature film, Saltburn. Her debut, Promising Young Woman, premiered at Sundance that year and, after everything shut down, it was theatrically released by Focus Features on Christmas (not anywhere near Greater Baltimore) and VOD on January 15, 2021. I must’ve watched it around that time, and really hated it—a poorly-made and uninteresting exercise in sadism that insulted rather than comforted victims of sexual assault. Not that any movie should comfort you necessarily, but this was sold as a modern rape-revenge movie, despite the fact that Fennell herself said that “revenge isn’t very glamorous for women.” In other words, not proper.

I don’t care that she comes from British aristocracy, or that she’s known Saltburn actor Richard E. Grant and collaborator Andrew Lloyd Webber since she was a kid, or that she was able to call in favors to secure the film’s opulent locations. I care that an Academy Award winning filmmaker in her 30s is making such daft, stupid work. To be fair, I value Fennell more than many hacks, if only for providing a proper meter on how to gauge films on an aesthetic, technical, ethical, and moral level. Once again, Fennell’s sadism and misanthropy are not necessarily the problem, but her total lack of tonal control. Saltburn is about as grim as Brazil, with a sort of similar ending but none of the fun or invention of Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film.

Barry Keoghan plays the working class kid in this inverted Talented Mr. Ripley, a new student at a British boarding school who’s charmed and charms Jacob Elordi, the rich kid. Archie Madekwe is our Iago, suspicious and jealous of Keoghan from minute one. Like Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, the movie quickly cuts down the number of characters and isolates them on the titular property owned by Rosamund Pike and Grant, parents of Elordi, rulers of Saltburn. Madekwe comes along, too, and if you’ve read The Talented Mr. Ripley, seen the movie, or Purple Noon, then you’ve seen the rest of Saltburn.

As soon as the movie premiered, I read several reviews that singled out the ending as even more offensive and preposterous than that of Promising Young Woman. I don’t think so, if only for how badly that film misunderstood revenge, but it is another demonstration of Fennell’s uncut hatred for the human race. She said in a recent promotional interview, “I don’t think I know anyone that’s nice… I’m not nice.” She isn’t a punishing filmmaker in the same way Catherine Breillat is, she’s just a square desperate to offend. Unfortunately, she only knows the most boring ways possible.

Is a deranged criminal bisexual fucking the dirt grave of his muse homophobic? Why does Fennell linger on Keoghan slurping up Elordi’s cum from a spotless bathtub drain as if it weren’t something that gay men—and many straight women—do every day? Fennell packs her film with montages that look more like commercials, pure filler that shows how little she has to say and how uninteresting she really is. She thinks she’s going out on a limb, but never gets off the ground; instead, all we’re left with is a smug sense of unearned accomplishment brazing something less than mediocre, trash that doesn’t even have any mystery, something that’s perfectly clear about what it’s saying, and we all get the message that the author is an idiot.

—Follow Nicky Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith