Saltburn tells the story of Oliver, an awkward young man who befriends a rich guy at Oxford and meets his odd, entitled family.
At first, the movie is quite good. Barry Keoghan is ecellent as the awkward working class protagonist struggling to keep up with the upper classes. Jacob Elordi is appropriately charming. The folks at Saltburn all do great playing different flavors of odd - I particularly like Alison Oliver as the sister.
The movie is perhaps at its most entertaining when it first gets to the rich guy's home, a crazy mansion at Saltburn filled with snotty, gossipy, and profoundly weird characters. At the same time, I think that's when things start to go off the rails, because up until then the people felt fairly real but the family is quite cartoonish. It's the time when I started wondering - what exactly *is* this movie?
The bigger problem turns out to be the character(s) of Oliver. It's not that he isn't who he seems to be - that's a perfectly acceptable and not especially shocking twist. The issue is that his character shifts in weird ways. He's awkward and shy. He's weirdly mesmerizing and powerful. He's nice and friendly. He's creepy. And he just switches from one to the next and back with no one seeming to think it's weird or wondering why he's a totally different person than he was five hours ago. They should all be saying, hey, do you think Oliver has multiple personalities? But they don't. (And he doesn't - he's just badly written.)
Then there's the actual story, which culminates with a lot of death that no one finds suspicious and that, judging by the "big reveal" sequence at the end, writer/director Emerald Fennel thought was a lot less obvious than it actually was.
There are several problems here. First, the whole crime part makes no sense - there is no way no one these weird consecutive deaths wouldn't raise suspicions, no way Farleigh or the weird butler wouldn't at some point lay the sequence of events out to the police. It's ludicrous.
The crime section of the movie also drags things out much too long. There is a creepy scene in a graveyard that feels like the emotional endpoint of the film, and while stopping there would have left a lot of questions unresolved, it still *felt* like an endpoint. So everything after that feels like a really, really long coda. And this coda seems to move in slow motion, as though the director really hated to let go of the movie.
If the graveyard scene had ended the film, people would have wonder what happened after that, but this would have been far better than seeing what happened after that and thinking - Jesus, that was stupid. If you wanted to fill out the end, you could have had a quick series of newspaper clippings showing more death and Oliver's inheritance, and while it would still seem unlikely, at least it would be so quick we could see it more as a toss-off joke.
Fennel did a really good job with Promising Young Woman, which was dark but was *coherently* dark and had some depth. Perhaps since the main character was misunderstood, she decided this time around she would explain *everything* in great *detail* at the end, telling you everything that happened and how everyone really felt about everyone else, so that this time there would be no false assumptions.
Hopefully she does not do that again.
This movie, in spite of being genuinely entertaining and engrossing in parts, stumbles so badly at the end that it takes the whole movie down with it. So I don't recommend it, although it really does have good stuff in it.
At first, the movie is quite good. Barry Keoghan is ecellent as the awkward working class protagonist struggling to keep up with the upper classes. Jacob Elordi is appropriately charming. The folks at Saltburn all do great playing different flavors of odd - I particularly like Alison Oliver as the sister.
The movie is perhaps at its most entertaining when it first gets to the rich guy's home, a crazy mansion at Saltburn filled with snotty, gossipy, and profoundly weird characters. At the same time, I think that's when things start to go off the rails, because up until then the people felt fairly real but the family is quite cartoonish. It's the time when I started wondering - what exactly *is* this movie?
The bigger problem turns out to be the character(s) of Oliver. It's not that he isn't who he seems to be - that's a perfectly acceptable and not especially shocking twist. The issue is that his character shifts in weird ways. He's awkward and shy. He's weirdly mesmerizing and powerful. He's nice and friendly. He's creepy. And he just switches from one to the next and back with no one seeming to think it's weird or wondering why he's a totally different person than he was five hours ago. They should all be saying, hey, do you think Oliver has multiple personalities? But they don't. (And he doesn't - he's just badly written.)
Then there's the actual story, which culminates with a lot of death that no one finds suspicious and that, judging by the "big reveal" sequence at the end, writer/director Emerald Fennel thought was a lot less obvious than it actually was.
There are several problems here. First, the whole crime part makes no sense - there is no way no one these weird consecutive deaths wouldn't raise suspicions, no way Farleigh or the weird butler wouldn't at some point lay the sequence of events out to the police. It's ludicrous.
The crime section of the movie also drags things out much too long. There is a creepy scene in a graveyard that feels like the emotional endpoint of the film, and while stopping there would have left a lot of questions unresolved, it still *felt* like an endpoint. So everything after that feels like a really, really long coda. And this coda seems to move in slow motion, as though the director really hated to let go of the movie.
If the graveyard scene had ended the film, people would have wonder what happened after that, but this would have been far better than seeing what happened after that and thinking - Jesus, that was stupid. If you wanted to fill out the end, you could have had a quick series of newspaper clippings showing more death and Oliver's inheritance, and while it would still seem unlikely, at least it would be so quick we could see it more as a toss-off joke.
Fennel did a really good job with Promising Young Woman, which was dark but was *coherently* dark and had some depth. Perhaps since the main character was misunderstood, she decided this time around she would explain *everything* in great *detail* at the end, telling you everything that happened and how everyone really felt about everyone else, so that this time there would be no false assumptions.
Hopefully she does not do that again.
This movie, in spite of being genuinely entertaining and engrossing in parts, stumbles so badly at the end that it takes the whole movie down with it. So I don't recommend it, although it really does have good stuff in it.