I had been quite looking forward to hating Saltburn, the loose Brideshead Revisited reboot and second movie by Emerald Fennell that has been exciting wild animosity online. In the US, where the movie has been more generously received, the English national sport of automatically loathing something from a class to which one doesn’t belong is baffling. But in England, people have been going bananas. To credit the film-maker with an intention she almost certainly didn’t have, one might almost say this was a clever part of the film’s mission.
If you go looking for problems with this movie, of course you will find them. But the first half of the film, set in mid-2000s Oxford, is funny and well-observed, motored by a nostalgia for college that I found largely spot on. OK, it behaves as if, in 2006, people from “Merseyside” would have been received by the elite as visiting aliens, a theme returned to in the drawing room of Saltburn – the eponymous stately pile to which the young protagonists retreat – when the wacky concept of “Liverpool” is raised. Scenes like these, ostensibly poking fun at the posh people, perhaps reveal more about the narrowness of the film-maker’s own lane. Still, I laughed a lot.
