Saltburn, or, I Am Stretched On Your Grave

Since I liked Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” so much, I was pretty geared up to finally watch Saltburn. Somehow I’ve managed to stay almost completely unspoiled over the last few years, apart from the scene referenced in my title, and that it had Jacob Elordi and Rosamund Pike.

Oh, and also that it was either a bold and absolutely shocking take on English period dramas, or it was an inept and overrated piece of garbage that should haunt its writer and director for the rest of her career. One of those two.

As it turns out, I don’t think either of those are true. It’s not for me, but even as someone completely unfamiliar with the classics that inspired it (I’ve heard Brideshead Revisited mentioned multiple times, along with another title that would be a spoiler even to mention), I could see and appreciate what it was doing. It’s a darkly comic and horny take on stories about the British aristocracy, and people of lower classes longing for that life of wealth and privilege even after seeing all of its gross excesses.

In fact, that’s probably the biggest reason I didn’t like the movie: I could see what it was doing after about an hour in, but then I saw that there was still well over an hour to go. And even once the movie had explicitly established what it was doing, it just kept going on piling on one more ending after another, as if it were Return of the King or something.

Even after all that, I was eager to give it a begrudging pass, but then it added yet another ending that explicitly spelled out everything that I’d thought had been abundantly clear already. It’s one thing to overstay your welcome; it’s worse when you spend the entire time saying, “Get it? Did you see what we did? No, seriously, did you get it?”

It’s too bad, because there were plenty of elements that I thought were clever and perfectly under-played. Anything with Rosamund Pike’s character, to start with. She’s got the more obvious comedic moments, like when she casually confides that she was a lesbian for a while, but it was “too wet.”

But more than that, the character and the performance were perfectly in sync, suggesting layers to a shallow person that might’ve otherwise come across as a cartoon. There’s a real sense of tragedy and even sympathy to her character, someone who’s not evil and not necessarily good, but has simply lived in a kind of Plato’s cave of privilege her entire life, both because of her wealth and presumably, her beauty. It’s not that she lacks sympathy for less advantaged people; it’s just such an alien concept to her that she can’t even relate.

There’s a similar kind of sympathetic nuance with Jacob Elordi’s character Felix. Everyone projects onto him — not just Oliver, but everyone — a version of who he must be, because of his wealth and his looks. That means that everyone, including the audience, projects their own insecurities and desires onto him as well. People are eager, desperate, to be inside his “light,” but also afraid of when they’re inevitably going to be discarded or cast outside of it.

So there are hints throughout that he’s careless and thoughtless, putting all of his attention onto a person before growing bored and moving onto someone else. We in the audience are waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everything to fall apart. All without considering that these hints are all coming from unreliable people, and seem to be more about their insecurities over falling out of favor with Felix, more than anything about Felix himself.

And there’s another interesting angle to that, which I thought was described really well by Daniel Kibblesmith: “hot people [are] usually pretty nice to you because most of their daily interactions go well.” The cliche of the cruel and stuck-up hot person rarely lines up with reality, because in reality, hot people rarely have any need to be cruel. It’s just that people’s insecurities cause indifference to be interpreted as cruelty.

So we spend a lot of the first part of the movie wondering why a character like Felix seemed to be showing such outsized kindness to Oliver, and constantly questioning whether their friendship was genuine.

There are interesting ideas about class, wealth, and privilege inside Saltburn, and especially how much has changed and how much has stayed the same into the modern era, where the aristocracy is largely vestigial and the lines between classes are blurrier. And the movie does interesting things with those ideas, in a way that I haven’t seen before, using a classic and familiar story format to raise questions about how much of class structure is imposed on us vs how much we insist on imposing on ourselves.

I just think that it’s got maybe ninety minutes worth of those ideas stretched out over two hours, and I wish it had been less languid in its pacing, and more confident that the audience was going to be able to understand exactly what was happening.