Saltburn

 

Writer / director Emerald Fennell's smoldering send-up of English aristocracy, Saltburn, casts the terrific young Irish actor Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) as Oxford first-year scholarship student Oliver Quick, who befriends an impossibly handsome and irresponsible older student, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the heir to a large country estate.

After becoming carousing buddies, Felix invites Oliver, who has said he's estranged from his drug-addict parents, to the Catton home for the summer. At the house will be Lord and Lady Catton (Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike), Felix's sister Vanetia (Alison Oliver), their cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe of Gran Turismo) and Lady Catton's sister Pamela (Carey Mulligan of Promising Young Woman). It's a coterie of clueless self-absorption with which Oliver appears to fall in love.

Unlike the title character in Anthony Minghella's 1999 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley (the comparisons will be inevitable), Oliver is a cipher for much of the first half of the picture. He lurks and observes his betters, and we suspect there is more going on here but can't be sure who, or what, is the object of his obsession. The most obvious answer would be Felix, but there's the boozy Vanetia with whom Ollie consorts half-naked in the garden, and the carping Farleigh, who suspects Oliver is on the hunt but is not immune to seduction.

Fennell takes her time unwrapping the story; Oliver's menace becomes more obvious as the summer progresses. Like Tom Ripley, the unassuming Ollie knows how to stroke the vanities of the idle rich. That they are so easily flattered and manipulated simply adds to the audience's disdain for them and makes it easy to root for the cagey Quick.

Like her 2020 debut picture Promising Young Woman, Fennell's Saltburn will not be for every taste. Its bitterness is heavy, as is its kinkiness. But it's Keoghan, fearlessly baring all in the film's last reel, who makes the whole smarmy party pretty entertaining.