Emerald Fennel’s Saltburn made two hours and seven minutes feel like nothing. I only wished it could’ve been longer.
The story is set in 2006 at Oxford University with your typical nerd, Oliver Quick. He soon meets the charismatic Felix Catton. It is obvious that Oliver is smitten by Felix, but they don’t have a real conversation until later when Oliver runs into him when his bike has a flat tire. Oliver lends him his own bike and from there, they become fast friends. There’s only one problem: Oliver lies to Felix by claiming that he got a call that his father died; Felix offers him to stay at his castle of a home, Saltburn, in return. This may not hurt Oliver now, but it will come to bite him in the ass later.
Fennel left little to the imagination when it came to sex scenes that at some point, I felt like I was watching a porn movie, but if I’m being honest, these sexually disturbing parts were what made the movie even more interesting.
To name a couple, there was one scene where Oliver spent a wild night with Felix’s sister, Venetia; he smattered her own menstrual blood on her lips and proceeds to make out with her. Another explicit scene showed Oliver drinking watery semen as it goes down the drain of a bathtub after he spied Felix pleasuring himself while taking a bath.
From there, it became obvious that Oliver is turned on by Felix.When he finds out that Oliver is spending time with Venetia and becomes jealous, Oliver is secretly happy about this. The sexual tension between them was so strong at times that I thought this was about to become a tragic queer love story, but an unexpected plot twist towards the end suggested otherwise.
When Felix takes Oliver to his parents’ house for his birthday and later finds out about Oliver’s lie, they’re both devastated. Oliver tries to fix the friendship later that night by begging him to come back, but Felix pushes him away. The next morning, Felix turns up dead. The day after that, it’s Venetia.
Felix’s distraught father kicks Oliver out of the house. It isn’t until later when he reads the newspaper about the father’s death and bumps into Felix’s mother at a coffee shop that he’s invited back to Saltburn.
Everything falls into place when the movie fasts forward to Oliver talking to Felix’s mother, Lady Elsbeth, on her deathbed. He had been plotting from the beginning to take possession of Saltburn. The flashbacks reveal it was Oliver who flattened Felix’s tire as a way to get closer to him. We also learned that he was responsible for poisoning Felix and giving Venetia a razor because he knew she was suicidal. He even got a place close to Saltburn so that he would have the chance to bump into Felix’s mother. Behind that Oxford nerd’s mask had been a psychopath waiting in the wings.
To keep up with the psychotic theme,Fennel has Oliver pull Lady Elsbeth’s breathing tube from her mouth and watches her choke to death.
From start to finish, Saltburn made for an entertaining watch that keeps you on your toes. Fennel did a more than perfect job of orchestrating Oliver’s manipulation of Felix’s family that kept me guessing until the end.