Saltburn movie review: Barry Keoghan delivers jaw-dropping performance in the most provocative movie of the year

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Barry Keoghan stars as yet another of one those sociopaths that he has become so good at playing in his short career. In Saltburn, he’s Oliver Quick, a middle-class misfit who struggles to find his bearings as a first-year scholarship student in Oxford. Almost immediately, he is awestruck by the aristocratic Felix Catton, played with feline grace by the newly minted heartthrob, Jacob Elordi. Felix is naturally charismatic, the centre of attraction at every party fortunate to have him as a guest — he’s everything that the moth-like Oliver isn’t. But after a couple of chance encounters, he finds himself developing a curiosity for Oliver, and before long, they become inseparable.

When Oliver bares his heart to him one day about his mentally ill parents, who’ve struggled his entire life with drug addiction, Felix feels an instant pang of pity and invites him to spend the summer at his family’s sprawling countryside estate, Saltburn. Oliver is taken by the pomp and splendour of it all, and Felix’s family seems just as interested in him as he is in them.

Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant play Felix’s parents, delivering performances that deliberately feel like they don’t belong together in the same movie. Pike’s Elspeth could easily be an alternate reality version of Amy from Gone Girl, if she’d never actually returned to the bamboozled Ben Affleck and had started a new life under an assumed identity. In her first interaction with Oliver, she declares that she has “a complete and utter horror of ugliness,” and doesn’t bat an eyelid before describing her squatter friend Pamela — Carey Mulligan in a colourful cameo — as “the wettest of wet blankets.” To Elspeth, people like Oliver and Pamela are mere playthings, distractions that she will cycle through like they’re seasonal fashion lines.

But forget eating the rich, Saltburn doesn’t even pause to laugh at them. Of course, Oliver’s early days at the palatial property offer plenty of opportunity for fish-out-of-water humour. But it’s made clear fairly early on that he isn’t exactly going to function as our surrogate in this strange world. If anything, it’s the Catton family that comes across as more relatable, despite their frequently objectionable behaviour. So what if they host lavish parties that could give Jay Gatsby an inferiority complex; so what if they’re openly disdainful of others? Oliver — thanks mainly to genius casting or simply because of the way he’s written — is always enigmatic and never endearing. This isn’t necessary, of course, but even Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker evoked a certain level of empathy.

And this might understandably put you in an odd mood. The movie preys on the audience’s inherent decency, as it begs them to spare a thought for poor village bumpkin, only to yank the carpet out from under your feet deep in the second act. Oliver is the decoy protagonist, in many ways. The real hero of the story — the tragic hero — is Felix. And what a year Elordi is having, having balanced the harmless naïveté of his character here to the calculative villainy of his Elvis Presley, in the recent biopic Priscilla. There’s a reason why he’s being earmarked as Hollywood’s Next Big Thing.

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Fennell could’ve easily made Felix a more reprehensible fellow, but Elordi plays him as a bit of a himbo. Oliver’s ulterior motives, on the other hand, are underlined as more sinister. There are moments in the film’s frankly unhinged final third that could compel some viewers to stage a walk-out — one scene in particular might be the most provocative thing put in a mainstream movie this year. As with her first film, Fennell’s politics warrant a rigorous examination — she comes dangerously close to demonising the downtrodden and feeling pity for the privileged — but her formal evolution has been satisfying to witness.

Saltburn
Director – Emerald Fennell
Cast – Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E Grant, Archie Madekwe, Alison Oliver
Rating – 3.5/5