Grade: A-
One day, every piece of music that could possibly be written will be, and there will be no more new songs. Do you ever think about that? I do. There are only 12 different notes in a scale, and every combination will eventually be used up. You’ve seen Saltburn before, but at the same time, you haven’t. Writer/director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) touches on some tried-and-true cadences, but makes it work in a masterful, eerily beautiful, wickedly quirky way. The visuals alone suggest an almost Scorcesian craft with every shot. Just pick any one and show it in a film class. I liked Saltburn better than Promising Young Woman.
I’ve seen The Banshees of Inisherin twice, and I have yet to make it past Barry Keoghan’s line “there goes that dream” without getting something in my eye. He heads up Saltburn’s cast with the quiet sheepishness of a young Dustin Hoffman, as Oliver Quick. He is not one of the more affluent, frivolous, decadent party students at Oxford, but admires one from afar: Felix (Jacob Elordi, recently an effective Elvis Presley in Priscilla). They spark up a friendship, and Oliver is let into the clique, after a bro-meet-cute where Felix’s bike has a flat tire and he’s late for study hall, so Oliver lends him his. After a tragedy in Oliver’s family, Felix invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, his family’s sprawling estate. The movie takes its time to get there, and spends many meaningful moments at school first.
Saltburn’s inhabitants include Felix’s parents, played by Rosamund Pike (I Care a Lot, Gone Girl) and Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?). Alison Oliver is pitch-perfect and courageous in a role that I wonder if co-producer Margot Robbie was ever considered to play. Promising Young Woman’s star Carey Mulligan’s small supporting role is a neat torch-passing. And overseeing everything is Paul Rhys as Duncan – the stoic, imposing Lurch-like butler. He has been around forever, and has been privy to a world of incidents that he can never comment on.
Is Saltburn for you? I’d recommend it to anyone with a sick sense of humor, so I’ve already told a few friends about it. Skip over this paragraph if you don’t want to know about some influences, but I thought of The Great Gatsby, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Eyes Wide Shut, Moulin Rouge, and Parasite, among others. There are two scenes that involve the ingestion of something that normally isn’t ingested, much less through the mouth. I knew about the first one beforehand, but it still made me cringe. The second one gave me a smile that I realized later stayed on my face through the whole bit.
The pool of symbolism and metaphor is thick within the vast property of Saltburn. Every scene feels like there’s a plethora of unspoken thoughts and feelings. So much mansion, so little that gets unpacked. It’s not just “a great soundtrack.” Fennell’s needle-drops, that include the likes of Arcade Fire and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, weave in and out in a rare way that punctuates and comments on the action. It’s like an extension of the score, which is no slouch, either. This is some of the best cinematography of the year. If Saltburn’s walls could talk. Hell, if Duncan could talk.
Fennell tends to hold our hands through her final acts. Promising Young Woman’s last scene, though exciting, was cinematic, flourishy, and relied on some unbelievably convenient timing. Saltburn’s conclusion provides us with a resolution to some loose ends that I didn’t need tied up, though they are anyway. I’ll tread delicately, but one thing – among a couple – I’ll share: we are expected to believe that someone spent all those years just biding their time and lying in wait – with apparently nothing happening in the interim. It is then that Saltburn settles into an all-familiar theme that I was hoping would be given a rest. Either way, Saltburn is one of the boldest, most memorable movies of the year, and cements Emerald Fennell as one of the best directors working today. Now if she could just let her endings be messier and more up in the air, she would be unstoppable.
Grade: A-
Film Reviews by Mark 
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