With his breakout supporting role in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2017 thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Barry Keoghan emerged as one of Hollywood’s most excitingly eccentric actors, and on the heels of last year’s Academy Award-nominated turn in The Banshees of Inisherin, he once again steals the show in Saltburn (in theaters Nov. 17), Emerald Fennell’s first writing/directing effort since winning a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Promising Young Woman. As a university freshman who gets a taste for the glamorous upper-crust life through friendship with a wealthy classmate, Keoghan proves an electric menace par excellence. His cunning and carnally devious schemer is the main attraction of this modernized riff on The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is never more than skin-deep and ultimately overstays its welcome but which comes alive when—especially in its latter half—it indulges in its most wildly deviant impulses.
No sooner has Oliver Quick (Keoghan) walked onto the Oxford University campus for his maiden 2006 year than he’s mocked for his low-rent preppy coat. Before he knows it, he’s identified by a fellow student as a kindred outcast, although Oliver is not content to accept that lowly station. Rather, from the moment of his arrival, he has his eyes set squarely on Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a tall, handsome aristocrat who’s holding court with the nonchalant confidence of the popular and privileged. Oliver bides his time waiting for an opportunity to meet this hunk, and he gets it when he finds Felix stranded thanks to a flat bike tire. Offering to graciously lend Felix his own bicycle, Oliver immediately gets into his target’s good graces and earns a seat at his pub table, this despite the fact that Felix’s cousin Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe) doesn’t trust this newcomer to their clique.
Saltburn tantalizes tragedy from the outset, with Oliver ruminating in hindsight on his love for Felix over montages of their friendship set to portentous opera. An air of doom hangs over Fennell’s story, but in its early going, it plays things incredibly straight, with Oliver slowly ingratiating himself into Felix’s life. While others view Oliver warily, Felix befriends him sincerely, and the key to Elordi’s sturdy performance is that he casts the young man’s open-hearted kindness and generosity as inherently tied up with his lifelong sense of entitlement. When the school year concludes, Felix asks Oliver to join him for the summer at his house, a palatial estate known as Saltburn, and Oliver—who’s already relayed tales of woe about his parents’ addictions, resulting in his father’s recent accidental death—readily accepts.
The tour Felix gives Oliver of his home reveals it to be a mini-Versailles, replete with libraries, drawing rooms, Henry VIII cabinets and Rubens paintings. As it turns out, Felix’s clan is equally lavish and over-the-top. Mom Elsbeth (a comical Rosamund Pike) is at once intensely friendly and casually cruel, operating simultaneously in both registers like a queen who’s too omnipotent to care about others’ feelings. Her cheery husband Sir James (Richard E. Grant) is a bit daft, as evidenced by his eagerness to attend a birthday party costume ball in his favorite suit of armor. Felix’s sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) is caustic, wary, and has a not-so-secret eating disorder that, as with everything else in this enclave, is discussed in brutally candid fashion. Elsbeth’s weirdo friend Pamela (Carey Mulligan) is a guest with fiery red hair and arms covered in tattoos who talks about her troubles and annoys her hosts by not leaving. And then there’s Farleigh, who detests Oliver’s intrusion into his insular family unit almost as much as he resents having to grovel at the feet of James and Elsbeth for financial support.
Fennell’s script sharply outlines these figures and her milieu, all old-world opulence going ever-so-slightly to seed around the edges, but Saltburn takes its time to a fault, slowly dramatizing Oliver’s attempts to get comfortable in yet another environment in which he doesn’t belong. Even in its most lackadaisical passages, though, Keoghan is transfixing, his character outwardly agreeable and charming albeit in a way that suggests something sinister lurking beneath his bland exterior. That façade eventually falls by the wayside, first via a bold compliment directed at Elsbeth and, then, during a bathtub incident and a misty midnight rendezvous with Venetia that suddenly, thrillingly tips things into lewd insanity. It’s at this instant that Oliver is formally outed as a vampiric predator intent on consuming everything he craves, and chewing up and spitting out anything that gets in his way. However, even after his protagonist’s true nature is revealed, Keoghan playfully vacillates between performative modes to exhilarating effect, culminating with a funereal act—of love, sorrow and screw-you hate—that’s jaw-droppingly hilarious.
Once it stops playing coy and embraces its deranged spirit, Saltburn becomes quite amusing, which is vital given that it’s otherwise just a glossy saga about class-conscious covetousness and the lengths some sociopaths will go to get what they want. The delirium is in the details, the best of which are too eye-opening to reveal here, and in its later stages, Fennell’s narrative ups the ante to such outrageous heights that it seems like anything might transpire. The film’s centerpiece provocations are its lifeblood, energizing its rather routine tale of deception and manipulation, with Keoghan as a master of ceremonies who’s adept at perceiving people’s weaknesses and exploiting them for his own ends—and to wreak great, callous ruin.
Saltburn is adept at delivering dark, demented shocks, yet its plotting is occasionally clunky and there’s little surprise with regards to its final destination. Similarly, Fennell’s direction is stylishly off-kilter but incapable of complimenting the material’s stock thematic ideas; when, in a meeting with an advisor, Oliver castigates Farleigh for negatively focusing on form at the expense of content, the opinion resonates as Fennell’s preemptive response to critiques of the proceedings’ superficial aesthetics. Still, if it eventually comes across as merely the cinematic equivalent of a trashy beach read, it does have the magnificent Keoghan, who conspires and betrays with pitiless precision, and who closes this extravagantly unhinged affair with a dance through Saltburn that, in every respect, is the definition of cocky.
