Oh, Oliver Quick. With a name like that and a hardscrabble background story to boot, this eager and naïve and easily mocked scholarship student who arrives at Oxford in 2006 would seem to have a Dickensian quality. But as portrayed by the electric Barry Keoghan in Emerald Fennell’s outlandish and psychologically grotesque and pitch-black comedy/thriller “Saltburn,” our man Oliver turns out to be more of a Tom-Ripley-meets-Patrick-Bateman kind of guy.
Writer-director Fennell, who won an Oscar for her screenplay of her film “Promising Young Woman” (2020), once again proves to be a cinematic provocateur capable of creating memorable shock-value moments, though at times the candy-colored, exquisitely staged yet often brutally ugly histrionics are more about the fireworks than substance.
