Saltburn

In cinemas now

With her delightfully acerbic directorial debut, Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell established herself as a writer-director of considerable substance, with that empowering feature striking a chord with audiences in the wake of the #MeToo movement. As is the case with any fledgling cinematic voice, her follow-up was always likely to incite interest, and the debauched Saltburn certainly takes advantage of that.

Helmed by men of the moment Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, Fennell’s darkly comic psychological thriller follows Oxford scholar Oliver (Keoghan) in his pursuit of a more assured and outrageously affluent classmate (Elordi), a hunt that eventually leads him to the country estate from which the film lends its name. Keoghan and Elordi are typically effective in the lead roles, although they are both outshone by outrageous supporting turns from Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike.

However, the issue with Saltburn is that, for all its brazen excess and depravity, it feels overwhelmingly familiar, almost to the point where you could it label it as ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley with added homoeroticism’. Viewers who proudly identify that as being their bag will more than likely have a riotous time with Fennell’s film, others not so much. It’s also hard to escape the nagging sense that Fennell, the daughter of a jewellery designer and author and a former Oxford student, is perhaps not best positioned to perform a character assassination of those who follow a lifestyle that is presumably not dissimilar to her own.

Unfortunately, these issues overshadow what is otherwise a visually arresting (Linus Sandgren’s cinematographer work is stellar) and splendidly acted affair.