Saltburn (2023)

There is much to love about Saltburn, like Emerald Fennell's previous feature, Promising Young Woman, this movie is glossy and bright, with witty barbs and humorous scenarios, but Saltburn is much better than PYW, primarily because it is having a lot more fun. Paradoxically – since Saltburn is about very, very wealthy people – this film is a good deal less smug than Fennell's first feature. Or rather, to be smug in Saltburn is to ask to be punished. The most smug person in the room is always Farleigh, and the film never, ever takes Farleigh's side.

I shouldn't spend a ton of time comparing Saltburn to PYW because it isn't really fair, but I will make one more point of comparison and then move on. One thing I loved about Saltburn is that it is always on the main character's side. We always follow Oliver, even when he's being very, very strange. This is not true of PYW, which often took the point of view of the men who were troubled by the main character's strange behavior. But Saltburn's central character is a very strange dude. In fact, the film begins with a question. Was I in love with him? Did I love him? It's a mystery the movie continues to play with. How does Oliver feel about Felix? Oliver does some truly baffling things, so much so that at times I was squealing and squirming in the theatre. Like oh my god the bathwater. And the cunnilingus. So much good, weird stuff. I loved every bit of this weirdness. But even when the camera watches Oliver watch Felix have sex with a girl in his dormitory, the camera is on Oliver's side. We watch with him. We never see Oliver from anyone else's perspective, except (very briefly) when Farleigh sees Oliver and Venetia from the window.

One of the great things about this tactic on Fennell's part is that Oliver himself remains a social mystery. How does everyone else feel about Oliver? It is actually very difficult to answer this question because the film doesn't care; Saltburn is interested in how Oliver feels about how everyone feels about Oliver, but the movie spends almost no time judging Oliver from the perspective of the family. Even when Ollie wears out his welcome with Sir James and we know that Sir James wants Oliver to leave, Saltburn doesn't take Sir James's side. We're on Ollie's side, stubbornly refusing to leave Saltburn until we get our payoff.

The next James Bond?

This movie is cast beautifully. Barry Keoghan is a perfect star. Carey Mulligan is pitch perfect in her small, weird, depressive part. Jacob Elordi is gorgeous (although to my mind slightly lacking in power – he's never, for example, quite as awesome as Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley), and Richard E. Grant is an utter delight. But for me the real revelation is Rosamund Pike. She tears into this fucking role and is unstoppably funny. She's just truly genius and deserves an Oscar nomination for this part. The movie is not Oscar stuff, I don't think, so I am not sure she can score a nomination. I will beat this drum, though. She definitely deserves it.

The other intriguing thing about Saltburn is the way it sort of riffs off of Pasolini's very sexy 1968 film Teorema. Saltburn doesn't have the intriguing spiritual elements of Pasolini's movie, but Oliver does seem to have a kind of pansexual power over the people in the house, and this definitely made me think of the way Terence Stamp worked through every family member, seducing each one in turn. 

Anyway, Saltburn is wacky and weird and a ton of fun. For me, when I try to think about Oliver and who he is I think the film does a great job of moving away from him as a sort of symbol or icon. One might see Ollie as a kind of symbol of ancient necessity or something (the way Keoghan's part worked in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example), but Fennell's characters are surprisingly rich and complex here. Even the film's villains – Farleigh and Elspeth and Sir James and Felix and Venetia – are interesting and complicated; they're not easy symbols or shallow figures created to make a point. Everyone feels full and fascinating. My explanation for all of Ollie's behavior is not that he loved him, so much as, perhaps, he needed to consume these people like a sort of ancient cannibalism or vampirism (he says that he is a vampire, after all), in order that he might be able to become them. He's a Tom Ripley for 2023, sexy and lonely and completely insane. In any case, I had a great time.

Promising Young Woman

I don't know. I'm really on the fence with Promising Young Woman. On the one hand, this is a message film with a smart message – it's even a film about sexual violence that smartly avoids the question of consent. On the other hand, Promising Young Woman is smug and sleek in places where it doesn't need to be. And it settles for metaphors and symbols in place of real people. And the end is really perplexing. The film itself decides to commit a gruesome act of violence against one of its characters. I don't know how to justify that.

If you haven't seen it stop reading now, but I want to explain myself, so I'm going to describe a couple of moments in the film where I got frustrated with its gaze.

The first was when the protagonist, Cassie, sort of loses it in the middle of the street and take a tire iron to a random stranger's car and breaks the windshield and all the lights. Cassie is having a breakdown. She's frustrated and feeling powerless, and she commits this more-or-less random act of violence, but Promising Young Woman isn't interested in Cassie's experience of this event. Instead, the camera follows... the tire iron. We see Cassie from the back and she breaks the lights and comes around the rear of the car, and then the camera focuses on the car's driver and his experience of the event as he screams at her and calls her crazy. This frustrated me because I felt like it asked me to see the event as an outsider and not as someone who was identifying with Cassie and her experience of this.

The other time the film really lost me was when Cassie is murdered in act three. The film doesn't show Cassie's experience of this event at all. Because Fennell's focus is on plot and surprising the audience, she doesn't have Cassie let us in on what she's planning. We don't know what's going on, and when the man begins murdering her, we are caught up in the question of what is going to happen. The thing is, that Cassie is completely out of the picture by now. Cassie's murder, which takes rather a while, is shot from the murderer's point of view. What we get is his experience of her death – and he's freaked out and panicked, even, to a certain extent, sympathetic, at least in this moment. 

And I'm not sure I forgive the film for this. Promising Young Woman is a good film, but it never really felt dangerous to me. I knew we were in trouble when the screenplay finally reveals that every weekend Cassie pretends to be drunk, performs very elaborate ruses, goes home with these deadbeat assholes, and then lectures them??? Seriously? That's as dangerous as the film wants to get? I think this movie plays it safe the whole time. It feels, moreover, like a kind of morally superior exercise in smugness that cares more about winning than in the actual suffering of survivors of sexual assault.