“Saltburn” Is an Important Addition to the Homicidal Queer Con Artistry Canon

Peering through a crack in a heavy door like a little voyeur or the viewer of Degas’s bathers if Edgar did homoeroticism, Barry Keoghan’s laughably Dickensian (or Roald Dahl-ian)-named Oliver Quick watches from behind as the golden-bodied object of his affection/obsession/envy, Jacob Elordi’s Felix Catton, jacks off until completion in an opulent old bathtub, placed smack dab in the center of the large bathroom. After Felix towels off and leaves with a jaunty, “Night, mate!”, Oliver sneaks in—not to wash up himself—but to crawl, fully pajama-ed, into the draining tub. Lit as if in a spotlight, Oliver kneels in prayer, in absolution, and rubs his face into the still-burbling drain, sucking the cum-infused bathwater. SLURP! A breath. SLURP! A lick of the metallic drain. SLUUUUUURP!

At the final longest slurp, a woman seated several rows in front of me stood and marched out of my screening of Emerald Fennell’s film Saltburn. Responding to the audience’s groans of horror and delight at the splooge-swilling, she thought she spoke for all of us when she whispered exasperatedly, “Enough!” She didn’t—well, at least for me. I cannot recall the last film I attended in which I witnessed a walkout. Reported furious walkouts of Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (which notably topped John Waters’s Best Films of 2023 list) were what motivated me to get to the theater but sadly, none of my co-audience seemed repelled by Aster’s 3-hour ride of a film. Too bad. Aren’t walkouts even better than standing ovations? Better than an Academy Award, even? That a piece of cinema could be so reviled, so loathed, so deeply offensive to a person’s sensibilities that they decide it’s not even worth passively sitting through?! Even in astronomically priced Manhattan arthouse cinemas! As this audience member walked out, I felt a shiver of glee run through me—it was at this point, along with Keoghan’s spunk-gargling enthusiasm (an enthusiasm, which he brings to every one of Oliver’s demented actions), that I fell completely in love with Saltburn. What a shame she had to miss the following scene of period pussy-eating with Felix’s vacant-eyed sister Venetia (Alison Oliver)!

It’s not only the parade of perversions—Oliver’s vampiric mouth covered in menstrual blood, shot under more bathwater! Shirtless muddy symbolically necrophiliac grave fucking! Threatening handjobs! All those shots of vomit!—that attracts me to Saltburn, though, of course, these unforgettable scenes don’t hurt. Keoghan’s Oliver Quick is a subtly (well, until he’s outright) menacing character that deserves a rightful place in the canon of iconic queer pathological—often to the point of homicidal—liar scammers, sitting alongside such already sanctified figures as The Talented Mr. Ripley’s Tom Ripley (both in Patricia Highsmith’s novel and its equally intoxicating 1999 film adaptation by Anthony Minghella), Gianni Versace assassin and spree killer Andrew Cunanan (both in his real-life incarnation and Darren Criss’s singular depiction in American Crime Story) and, while the homicidal part has yet to come, the recently self-proclaimed “people’s princess,” George Santos.

Oliver, like these other fictional and real men, desires. He desires another, better, wealthier, more extravagant, and exciting life and the man (and his family) who appears to already be living that life, Felix. Oliver’s feelings for Felix are introduced immediately, before we get to fully meet the characters, with a voiceover that mimics Lana Del Rey’s monologue as Jackie Kennedy in her “National Anthem” music video: “I loved him, I loved him, I loved him…” But unlike Lana, Oliver adds a caveat, “But not in love with him.” Sure. Oliver’s fascination with Felix is as much about class as it is physical attraction, though Fennell allows long lingering shots on Elordi’s ideal heartthrob physique (here much more defined than during his pound-of-bacon breakfast diet as Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla). Oliver arrives at Oxford in the mid-aughts as a nerdy scholarship student, wearing the dweeb uniform: glasses, an ill-fitting shirt, and a tie. An immediate outcast in the heavily hierarchical school, his only friend is the other “NFI” “Not Fucking Invited,” a Maths-loving fellow bespeckled dork Michael Gavey (Ewan Mitchell) who pulls on the heartstrings as you just know he’s going to be instantly left in Oliver’s dust. Which, of course, he is.

From the start, Oliver has eyes for the rich crowd—for Felix, his many girlfriends, and Felix’s cousin, the perpetually snotty and snide Farleigh Start (Archie Madekwe) who, being a fellow gay moocher, sees through Oliver almost instantly. From the beginning, Oliver makes awkward, alienated, and needy glances at this clique from afar. It’s only when he loans his bike to Felix, who is beset with a flat tire, that he begins to get sucked into the cool-kid circuit. Felix becomes increasingly attached to Oliver once Oliver opens up about his home life, weaving a sob story about a lonely poverty-stricken upbringing with drunk drug-addicted parental wrecks. After some drifting away as Felix begins to tire of his new misfit toy, Oliver finally clinches the friendship by rushing to Felix’s side to tell him about his father’s substance-fueled death. Felix, sorry for his lowly friend and desperate to play benevolent benefactor, invites him to spend the summer at Saltburn, the grand rural estate of his titled—and entitled—parents, Sir James Catton, played delusionally out-of-touch and exaggeratedly stiff upper-lipped by Richard E. Grant, and Lady Elspeth Catton, a hilariously breezily nasty Rosamund Pike.

Saltburn, appropriately, is a grand Gothic estate with a vast expanse of acreage filled with a comical amount of nightly fog,  a perfect selection of mirrors for moody self-reflecting identity crises (not anywhere near as many mirror scenes as Todd Haynes’s May December, though) and, naturally, an unwelcoming and unsettling butler Duncan (Paul Rhys) who has a knack for appearing out of thin air at inopportune moments. Despite being set in 2006, the traditions at Saltburn remain antiquated, including oppressively formal, chandelier-and-candle-lit, black-tie dinners. This spooky atmosphere is punctured numerous times by Fennell’s penchant for candy-colored cinematography, mostly showcased through more than a few decadent party montages set to mid-aughts classics like MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” (Fennell’s song choices are not, shall we say, subtle). Even so, despite the thin veil of elite politeness, the actions of those within Saltburn tend toward the darker end of the spectrum: binge-drinking, coke-snorting, gossiping, backstabbing, conniving, lying, seducing, fucking, poisoning, pushing into suicide, dramatic extubation…And Oliver just happens to be much more talented at these than the others.

If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Saltburn is one part Brideshead Revisited, one part The Talented Mr. Ripley, and one part Teorema. This didn’t take a whole lot of critical insight on my part—Saltburn proclaims its inspirations loudly. While there is a direct reference to Waugh in the film and Oliver’s dedication to fuck everyone in the house except for Daddy James is pure Terence Stamp in Pasolini’s classic, The Talented Mr. Ripley is the most influential of the trio. Recently rewatching Minghella’s film, some scenes appear to be direct references—Felix’s anger at Oliver’s low (actually, as we learn, middle)-class impulse to tidy up his room, frequent intimations about how Felix will drop Oliver immediately, and the inevitable leap into homicidal fury once the lies start crumbling around Oliver. Farleigh also seems like a millennial reflection of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s loathsome yet insightful irritant Freddie Miles, just with more bitchiness and less greasy smarm. Now, Saltburn isn’t exactly as good as its influences. But I don’t hold that against Fennell. Everyone can’t be Pasolini, Highsmith, or Waugh.

Not that Saltburn is beyond critique. In particular, the choice to set the film in the mid-aughts is baffling. The only indication that the film is in 2006, rather than 2023, seems to be an Oxford student’s Juicy Couture-emblazoned ass, Felix’s eyebrow ring, which is quickly discarded, the lack of smartphones and social media, and the film’s soundtrack choices. The latter two, I assume, account for the film’s chosen timeline. Despite allowing the characters not to be social media-fixated (and thus, giving Oliver an easier time pulling off his scams), the 1:33:1 aspect ratio gives the sense of a square-shaped Instagram post rather than the peeper keyhole interpretation Fennell intended. And, admittedly, the constant assault of shocking and absurd scenes does tend toward The Idol in its pure outrageousness, but for me, that is a positive.

These are relatively minor complaints. Saltburn succeeds in nailing a delightfully filthy erotic thriller with some notably smart and funny dialogue. In particular, Carey Mulligan’s zany red-wigged Pamela, a friend of Lady Elspeth’s who is staying at Saltburn to lick her wounds after a failed romance, steals the show, even with her limited on-screen time. She recalls her doomed affair with a Russian oligarch whose business partners “started sort of falling out of windows, you know.” She frequently acts as a verbal sparring partner with Pike’s Lady Elspeth who wants Pamela to move out as soon as possible, no matter what dump of a flat she has to rent. Lady Elspeth gets the last word, however. Upon informing Oliver of Pamela’s suicide, she proclaims: “She’d do anything for attention.” Dark. Awful. Hilarious. Elspeth has other zingers too, often delivered with a cocktail glass in hand. My favorite has to be her explanation of preferring men over women: “I was a lesbian for a while, you know, but it was all a bit too wet for me in the end. Men are so lovely and dry.”

Apparently, despite the clear thrill of the audience in my theater, humor wasn’t good enough for a lot of critics, anyone with Internet access and a Letterboxd account who now figure themselves the new Roger Ebert, or fellow filmmaker Paul Schrader who, in true Boomer fashion, blasted the film on Facebook (After watching the stiff Master Gardener, Schrader should maybe lay off critiques of other films). “Is Saltburn the most divisive film of the year?” asks a Guardian headline, citing critical opinions that find it to be “a flashy, self-satisfied mess of empty provocations.” The most divisive? I’m not sure about that—but its score on Rotten Tomatoes does get lower every time I check. The most furious critic may have been The New York Times’ Wesley Morris who declared, “’Saltburn’ is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.” For the record, I was excited.

Much of the negative reactions, unsurprisingly, rest on the belief that the film is all style, no substance—or, as Vulture observed, “all vibes and empty provocations.” What exactly is the substance that critics seek? An overt class critique, of course! Not only are critics complaining that Fennell, a child of the upper class herself as the daughter of famous jeweler Theo Fennell (which explains how she nails the rich’s flippant cattiness), didn’t make a cinematic Marxist manifesto, but they also seem to think it contains some sort of scorn for the rest of us. London’s Evening Standard described Saltburn as “profoundly anti-upward mobility,” while The Guardian’s Daniel Lavelle said, “Emerald Fennell despises the middle classes.” The most absurd has to be K.J. Yossman’s review in Variety, which calls out Emerald, a fellow Oxford graduate, for not making the kids at Oxford mean enough: “…critics are right that ‘Saltburn’ whitewashes the uglier side of the upper classes.”

Now, we’ve heard much of this before—many remind me of some of the responses Infinity Pool received earlier this year for also not containing the exact type of class critique writers desired. As with Brandon Cronenberg’s decadent movie, the problem is not with Saltburn but with criticism itself, which, in recent years, has begun to view all culture as requiring a subtext of morality. Every film has to be a modern-day fable telling us how to live “good” lives with “good” politics or satirizing the “bad” people with “bad” politics. Never mind that those films are always the most boring. Case in point: I hated Fennell’s previous much-lauded Promising Young Woman for this exact reason, a #MeToo-era revenge flick that I found way too on-the-nose and morally righteous (all those Christ-like shots of Carey Mulligan’s Cassandra. Also just the character’s name) to fully enjoy. I would much rather watch Cassandra psychopathically brutalizing horny dates like a black widow spider without bashing viewers over the head with some obvious point about how misogynist society treats women.

That is what Fennell gives us with Oliver. In some respects, I disagree with the writers who find the film scornful of the middle class. The film’s first twist that Oliver didn’t grow up in a gutter says something about what the upper crust wants from the rest of us—charity cases. It’s notable that, unlike the other queer scammers previously mentioned, Oliver is the only one who diminishes his class in order to claw his way to the top. Yet, that isn’t the point of the film per se. Saltburn is much more anarchic and even, nihilistic than that—and because of this, much more thrilling. Fennell gives us a psychotic queer scammer that wins. Oliver doesn’t go out with a suicidal gunshot to the head surrounded by SWAT teams on a houseboat like Andrew Cunanan, nor does he weep desperately after strangling his lover on a boat like Tom Ripley, nor does he get booted out of Congress like George Santos. Instead, in a moment of pure catharsis and camp, he dances.