Saltburn, the second film by British actress, director and screenwriter Emerald Fennel, after her debut with Promising Young Woman in 2021, chronicles the unlikely friendship between two Oxford University students in 2007. Oliver, portrayed by Irish actor Barry Keoghan, seen in The Banshees of Inisherin by Martin McDonagh, is a short, clumsy and badly dressed guy, while Felix (Jacob Elordi, the Australian actor who plays Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s film Priscilla), is a rich, tall and handsome boy, who out of compassion invites the less fortunate fellow to spend summer vacation with his aristocratic family in their sumptuous villa called Saltburn. Rosamund Pike is excellent in the role of Felix’s mother, as is Richard E. Grant in the role of his father, and Carey Mulligan, the protagonist of A Promising Woman, has a supporting role.
Emerald Fennell on zoom
“I intended to make a film in the British Gothic genre, a romantic horror such as Dracula (1958, directed by Terence Fisher from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel), Wuthering Heights, (1939, directed by William Wyler from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel), Rebecca (1940, by Alfred Hitchcock). My story is inspired by Brideshead Revisited (1981 TV series and 2008 film from Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel), The Go-Between (1971 by Joseph Losey), The Great Gatsby (1974, from the 1925 novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald), Atonement (2007 directed by Joe Wright from the 2001 novel by Ian McEwan). The plot tells what happened the previous summer, when everyone was gathered in this country estate, a claustrophobic environment like in a haunted house, events from which no one has ever been able to recover. Perhaps because I’m British I’m interested in the huge manors of the aristocracy and the royal family, a genre that has been successfully exported by TV series such as Downton Abbey (2011-2016 created by Julian Fellowes).”
“I wanted to talk about sex and unconsumed desire, class difference and power. We are in a particular moment as human beings in the world we live in, and we often despise the things we want, we want relationships we can’t have with people we see on Instagram; we envy the lives of others, we love them and we hate them at the same time, in a dirty and sadomasochistic tension that makes us hate ourselves. So I threw this into a cauldron and this irrational movie came out of it.”
“I was interested in examining how we usually lie deeply to ourselves every day, and I felt a huge sympathy for Oliver’s character, with whom I identify in many ways. Oliver suffers from a syndrome that we all suffer from, which is that we want to become someone else, reinvent ourselves. Oliver had worked his whole life to get to a university like Oxford, which he had fantasized about, and he thought would open all the doors for him, then when he got there, he realized that hard work was considered pathetic behavior, and everything that he thought it was worth it, it’s not. As we all do at the age of 18, when we are finally adults and start university, we want to make new friends, seduce people; so when Oliver is faced with someone like Felix, he wants to make the right moves, then try to understand what he wants to be told and tell him. It’s a deception, but everything Oliver does is completely normal, everybody does it, except that he does it better than the others, he gives people what they want and they’re happy, until they start dying.”
“In my profession as a director I do not make moral judgments on the behavior of my characters, because I do not consider it useful, but I have the obligation to tell the truth, which may seem strange when talking about a work of fiction.”
“I am thrilled that this film is meant to be seen in cinemas, where you are in a dark room with other people, a dynamic that is in itself fascinating. And all the screenings that I have seen have elicited different but always visceral responses: shouts, screams, gasps, disgust, despair, laughter. Just like on a rollercoaster.”
Without spoiling too much, we can reveal that Saltburn reminds us of films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) with Matt Damon, directed by Anthony Minghella from the 1955 novel by Patrizia Highsmith, and Teorema (1968) by Pier Paolo Pasolini with Terence Stamp.
Published in Best Movie, Italy. December 21, 2023