Rating: 2.5/5

This review contains major spoilers for Saltburn.

If you haven't already heard, there's a scene in Saltburn where Barry Keoghan sucks Jacob Elordi's cum out of a bathtub. If you were imagining it how I was, you were thinking that there's just a bit of cum floating on the water after he's done bathing and Barry takes a delicate sip from the top. Revolting, but not so bad you'd want to wash your eyes out. Oh no. It's not that simple. The water has already drained from the tub. Barry presses his lips to the plughole and slurps. Whatever semen remains, he savours it. Nose pressed against the tub, lips pursed, cheek rubbing against the porcelain - slurping. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone quite so horny.

Take a look in the comments section of any TikTok on the topic of Saltburn and it's likely someone has mentioned the infamous 'bathtub scene'. In the replies, you'll see others claiming that it wasn't the worst scene in the film. They're correct; there are worse scenes. But, as hard as you may try to scour the comments and search bar results for depictions of these scenes, no clip will come close to watching them in their full glory amongst the rest of the two-hour black comedy.

Saltburn is not a waste of time. Whilst Emerald Fennell has written a mediocre screenplay, she has directed a beautiful film. If you're watching it at home, you'll have to turn up the brightness on the telly to be able to see half the scenes to fully appreciate the colour grading, but that's by the by. The point is places like Oxford University and Saltburn estate are really fucking nice to look at - as are the people in them. Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), our wily protagonist, loves to look at these pretty people and places from his outsider's perspective. We're introduced to him at the beginning as our analeptic narrator, which somewhat spoils the film (if TikTok hadn't done that for you already).

The year is 2006; the same year Fennell herself would have been attending Oxford. The first half of the film does a strong job of portraying the class snobbery that is still prevalent at Russell Group universities. Have you got a funny northern accent? You bet your arse the posh southerners will pick up on it, and even if they're not from the south, they'll take the piss out of you just to join in on the joke. Oliver has been a hard-working little northern boy and read the entire reading list over the summer - what a nerd! Still, we get it, he had to work harder than everyone else to get where he is because he came from a strange land called Prescot. I enjoyed this section of the film. Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), a wealthy American, takes sadistic joy in highlighting all the ways Oliver is financially and socially inadequate; Felix (Jacob Elordi), the extroverted posh boy and coincidentally Farleigh's cousin, takes Oliver under his wing and attempts to protect him from the prejudice - or, at least, coach him on how to assimilate. Michael, the friend Oliver abandons to pursue a life with the wealthy clique, is infuriated by this, calling Oliver one of my favourite insults: bootlicker.

Amongst the closeness-building montage between Oliver and Felix, we see a glimpse of Oliver's voyeuristic tendencies: him, watching from the bushes, as Felix gets off with a girl in his bedroom. Earlier, he told Felix he didn't smoke. But here, whilst he watches in secret, he's smoking.

Unaware of the stalking, Felix begins to feel suffocated by Oliver's presence. He drifts away from him until, conveniently, Oliver's dad dies, reigniting the spark between them. As a show of support, Felix invites Oliver to stay at his family's estate: Saltburn. (That's the name of the film!)

The second act of the film tries to give us a satirical narrative of the upper-class. Rosamund Pike does well with the material she's given, but ultimately, there's not much to work with. She's a somewhat bohemian posh lady with stories to tell about all the famous people she spent time with in the 90s. Richard E. Grant is also there. Carey Mulligan leaves a lasting impression as the tragic, beautiful, and weird Poor Old Pamela, who ends up dying "for the attention", as Elspeth (Rosamund Pike) tells us. Their pity for the less fortunate can only stretch so far.

Everyone is amused by the lower-class Oliver. He doesn't mind; he's so appreciative of the family's... kindness. Venetia (Alison Oliver) takes a liking to him, and we get a menstrual-fetish daddy-dom sex scene between herself and Oliver. Something-something eat the rich, whatever. Farleigh continues to despise Oliver, so Oliver visits him in the middle of the night to give him a dubious spit-soaked handjob. Something-something "our sadomashistic relationship with the aristocracy." Good god, she's flipped the switch.

Eventually, we find out that Oliver's actually middle class. The horror! He was lying so he could seem cool and sad to get Felix's attention. Why though? Because he's so deeply infatuated with Oliver? No, silly, he wants Saltburn. If you didn't pick up on that, though, Farleigh sums it up in his delightful supervillain-esque monologue:

Oh, Oliver. You'll never catch on. This place... you know, it’s not for you. It is a fucking dream. It is an anecdote you’ll bore your fat kids with at Christmas... Oliver's Once-in-a-Lifetime, Hand job on a haybale, Golden, Big-boy Summer... And you'll cling onto it and comb over it and jerk off to it and you’ll wonder how you could ever, ever, ever, ever get it back. But you don't get it back... Because your summer's over. And so you, you catch a train to whatever creepy doll factory it is they make Olivers in. And I come back here...

 But, then the third act kicks into action with the following sequence of events:

1.     Felix dies.

2.     Farleigh gets kicked out of Saltburn for doing coke.

3.     Venetia takes her own life.

You'll never guess who's behind all of this!

Long story short, Oliver has manipulated everything, so he gets to inherit Saltburn. He dances around the estate naked to Sophie Ellis-Bextor's 'Murder on the Dancefloor' in the closing scene. Look at him! He's beaten the rich into submission by picking them off one-by-one.

Saltburn wants to be gothic, and queer, and Y2K, and satirical. And yes, it's gothic, and yes, gay shit happens, and yes, it's set in the 2000s. But the satire falls deeply flat when it becomes painfully clear that the person who wrote the film comes from an privileged background herself. Fennell has cited The Go-Between by L.P. Harvey has an influence on her screenplay: "the British gothic country house [story of] romance, friendship, class, envy, sex." This idea that the lower classes are envious of the upper-class feels rather tone deaf. It also feels rather contradictory within the context of Fennell's screenplay; the Cattons are vapid and shallow. Their lifestyle makes them unempathetic to the misfortunes of those below them. Why would we want to be like them?

"What is it that we are all in such a permanent, pulsating state of want, for things and for people?... That’s what it feels like the last few years has been, especially with Covid, when we’ve been separated. We’re in this permanent space of longing."[1] The want people have is not for an aristocratic lifestyle. The want people have is for basic necessities to be affordable. When Kim Kardashian threw her birthday party on a private island during the pandemic, the first thought that came to people's minds was not I wish I could do that. It was why is it one rule for them, and another for us?

Beyond the confused class satire, it can feel cringeworthy to watch, and not in the way it wants to be. The fetish-fuelled erotic scenes and moronic cluelessness of the Cattons do bring some intrigue to an otherwise dull film, but they don't make me cringe because of their repulsiveness; they make me cringe because they're trying so hard to be interesting. Still, this film does demonstrate Fennell's strengths as a director through its aesthetic choices and career-high performances from Keoghan, Elordi, and Oliver. The screenplay was perhaps a little too heavy on the smugness and exposition.

Some are able to watch Saltburn without considering its class implications too deeply. For others, though, it may seem like Fennell is halfway between extending her privileged pity towards us lower classes and laughing in our faces. This is what you want, isn't it? To eat us up and spit us out? Emerald, my dear, I just want inflation to come down and my wages to go up.