Saltburn, or the Luxury of Unreality

"#eattherich, etc"

If I were the hero of a film that wears its influences as proudly as Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s enthusiastic Brideshead fanfic, I’d probably do my research. True, Barry Keoghan’s Oliver Quick, in the time-honored role of scheming arriviste, does describe the life of his new Oxford friend, Jacob Elordi’s Felix Catton, as “like an Evelyn Waugh novel.” And yet, on his first morning as a guest at Felix’s ancestral family seat, Oliver tells a servant what he wants for breakfast. Record scratch! One is never waited on at breakfast. Doesn’t Oliver remember the bit in Gosford Park where an American makes this crashing faux pas?

Yes, it’s one of those films where we’re invited to shake our heads in bewilderment at the alien habits of poshos. Except it’s all soothingly familiar, a story drawn from other stories. The eponymous Saltburn, a vast 18^th century gated and turreted manor house, features a snooty butler (a palpably embarrassed Paul Rhys), acres of sun-dappled land with a swimming pool and tennis courts, and an airheaded chatelaine: Rosamund Pike as Elspeth Catton, Felix’s mother and hogger of all the best lines. “She’d do anything for attention,” she sighs of a friend’s suicide. A foray into lesbianism ended, Elspeth shares, because “it was all too wet. Men are so lovely and dry.” Richard E. Grant is her bumbling husband, Sir James, a part he could play in his sleep. And Felix’s sister, Venetia (Alison Oliver, unrecognizable from her turn as wet blanket Frances in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends), is your industry standard sexy spoiled blonde with an eating disorder—“fingers for pudding,” as Elspeth puts it.