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.
And in the first hour, there is a lot to praise. The setup of a beautiful rich student – played by Jacob Elordi – obsessively courted by a poor, rough one (Barry Keoghan) is an archetype for good reason: it works. Around the edges of that central relationship there are some astute observations. The depiction of friendless people banding together for want of other options but secretly hating each other is on the money. Rosamund Pike as lady of the manor and Carey Mulligan as the addled houseguest who won’t leave are both fine comic renderings. In this half of the film, Saltburn sits comfortably alongside Gosford Park as a decent addition to the category Posh People Say the Funniest Things.
This is how many of the American critics have received the film – as a “provocative and fun thriller,” to quote NPR, or an “aristo-gothic sexy thriller” as the Washington Post put it – namely a silly enterprise with some good laughs and nothing whatsoever to say about the world. That Saltburn was very obviously made for the American market (at one point, a British person orders his eggs “over easy”) perhaps explains some of its broadness and its power to irritate viewers at home. The New Statesman hammered Fennell for being too nostalgic about her upper-class world, which I thought unfair; people are allowed to be affectionate about their own experience and those scenes were very well done. Elsewhere, however, she founders.
For instance, the website Mashable called Saltburn “a self-aware queer comedy,” an assessment which, I imagine, would have delighted its maker but made me snigger unbecomingly. The inspiration for the film’s obsessive characters is clearly the work of Patricia Highsmith, specifically the Talented Mr Ripley. But while Highsmith’s grotesques grew from sublimated desires their lesbian creator understood, Fennell’s gay men are merely kitsch, presented with what, to me, feels like a whiff of opportunism.
Others sensed this too. “Here is a movie,” wrote the New York Times critic in by far the most vicious of the American reviews, “where gay things occur, but homosexuality abuts, alas, corruption and conniving”. He went on, “I suppose Fennell has made a movie about toxic elitism, but she’s done it in the way Ikea gives you assembly instructions.” Bloody hell! There are other, more delicious clangers in the film. The scene in which a middle-class home is depicted with its pathetic bourgeois anxieties is so tone-deaf that it feels like one of those American movies set in London in the 1990s, where they put raccoons in Hyde Park.
And yet, still, there is something off about these responses. As I write this, I feel in myself an eagerness to disparage the movie that isn’t entirely justified. Fennell has made a flawed piece of work, no worse in some ways than Quentin Tarantino’s sometimes incontinent maunderings about violence and obsession. Her greater crime, one suspects, has less to do with her efforts on screen and, in Britain at least, more with who she is: a person whose 18th birthday was covered in Tatler, and is altogether too pleased with herself to be tolerated.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
