Okay but Saltburn wasn't THAT bad

Why am I defending this movie?

See also: Okay but Persuasion wasn’t that bad

This newsletter contains spoilers for Saltburn, although I would argue that every other movie (and perhaps life itself) is a spoiler for Saltburn.

I’m sorry to once again deny the stated goal of this newsletter, which is to write about the things I’m obsessed with that aren’t part of the zeitgeist (like films from 2016). I can’t help it…sometimes the buzziest movies are unfortunately the ones that won’t stop buzzing in my head, like an incessant noise I can’t turn off even if I wanted to. And that’s how I feel about Saltburn: it’s annoying and it won’t shut up but I need to share it with you in hopes that I will finally be free!

I watched Saltburn for the same reason that I’m assuming most people did: because other people wouldn’t stop talking about how shocking it was. Well I’m here to tell you that by shocking, people basically meant this:

But first, let’s talk about the plot, in case you haven’t been sucked in by the siren song of Amazon Prime. Barry Keoghan, whom I/you loved in The Banshees of Inisherin (I have not and will not see The Killing of a Sacred Deer; I read the plot summary online and that was more than enough for me!), plays Oliver Quick. The name shows you the level of subtlety we’re getting here. He’s a scholarship student at Oxford in the mid 2000s…also known as the exact time I was in college. Oliver and I, we’re basically the same (we’re not). He becomes obsessed with Felix as played by Jacob Elordi, a man whose appeal I didn’t get until the first of several glowing montages in this very film. Frankly, I always thought he was goofy because I saw about ten minutes of The Kissing Booth and couldn’t tolerate another second. To be fair, he was much younger then and the beginning of that movie was bad. He’s still not my type of celebrity crush (is he a weird pale guy? No? Not interested!) but I can accept that he’s traditionally attractive.

Felix is rich; Oliver is poor. Oliver wants to be Felix, or be around him, or be with him. Felix alternately wants to help Oliver and is put off by him. Oliver scores himself an invite to Felix’s family estate….Saltburn. I wish Saltburn was the name of the main character, but that’s never stopped me from referring to the main character by the wrong name (see also: Grantchester). And then things…devolve. As the poster promises, “We’re all about to lose our minds.”

We’re all about to lose our minds! Love her!!!

Okay, so first of all…a certain segment of the online population acted like this was the worst movie of all time and I would like to dispute that. This movie isn’t that bad. It is, as I will further explain, very stupid. But it’s also, at times, quite entertaining. About half of the performances were great:

-Jacob Elordi: just has to be hot and occasionally frustrated and nails it

-Rosamund Pike: extremely funny

-Carey Mulligan: barely in the movie but made me laugh

-Richard E. Grant: just like in a previous bad movie I defended, he played a dad and I loved it

-Dorothy Atkinson: a small part, but she played Siegfried’s girlfriend in season 2 of All Creatures Great and Small and I was delighted to see her. It reminded me of how much crossover there was between All Creatures and Grantchester, and how as an American it sometimes feels like there are maybe 20 British actors and they’re always in everything. I love that.

-Barry Keoghan: I actually don’t know if he’s good or not because this role is written so strangely.

I wasn’t ever bored while watching, even though it was too long. Also, as previously mentioned, Saltburn takes place in 2006 and the music demonstrates that: Time to Pretend by MGMT (a portal to the mid 2000s if there ever was one), The Killers, and in one pivotal scene, Bloc Party. Sorry to be basic but I felt my youth rushing back toward me, even though I certainly didn’t go to Oxford. Actually, I went to college IN Oxford (Ohio). Again, Saltburn and I are basically the same person (we aren’t!!!).

For a film that advertised its willingness to shock (more on that later), I was rarely surprised by anything…because the film seemed to actively want to ruin its own surprises. If you’ve seen a lot of movies, or even if you’ve seen some crime procedurals, you can easily see what’s about to happen. You’ll see Oliver show up crying at Felix’s door and think to yourself, “wait, we didn’t actually HEAR that phone conversation.” You see Oliver’s increasingly obsessive behavior: the lingering outside windows (no one has ever listened outside quite so many windows! Good thing Ring cameras didn’t exist in 2006), the lingering in hallways, the lingering at the bathroom door. We’re essentially beaten over the head with what Oliver’s doing, but then it seems as if we’re supposed to be surprised by what happens. How could it possibly be surprising? That message was coming through louder and clearer than a Bloc Party song in a climactic moment!

One of my pet peeves in storytelling, which usually is more of an issue in mystery, has to do with how a story withholds certain details. There’s absolutely a way of doing it that feels right, that can feel so satisfyingly shocking when all is revealed. But there’s also a way of withholding that feels dishonest and deceptive, and can make a reveal feel hollow, and to some degree that’s how I felt about the ending of Saltburn…again, even though I knew what was going to happen. It was like duh, but also like well were you just lying to us? We see the entire film from Oliver’s perspective. Even when there are conversations that don’t involve him, conversations between other characters about him, we only hear them because he’s spying in the hallway or under a window. So to deliberately make so much of the action happen behind the scenes felt misleading and ultimately like…who cares.

I believe that people do find this film shocking, but I think that perhaps those people haven’t watched a ton of movies for grown ups (I almost said adult films, and sure, if you’ve seen a lot of adult films then this CERTAINLY won’t shock you, but you know that’s not what I mean). There’s nothing in here that’s even half as weird as the egg yolk scene from Tampopo, and that movie came out in 1985 (I watched it for the first time in junior high and it was formative for me, for egg reasons and non-egg reasons). I did enjoy the naked dance through the house, but am I supposed to be shocked by nudity? What kind of prude do you take me for??? A lot of it was gross, but call me Renee Zellweger because I’m not impressed!

I think a part of my “whatever” attitude is that I do not care about rich British people. People.com is already inundating me with every single thing the royal family does and those people are rarely interesting. I don’t know, we fought a war so I wouldn’t have to care about your weird family estate and your boring parties (that is my understanding of what the Revolutionary War was about).

Does it sound like I hated this movie? I didn’t. I enjoyed my time with it, and that’s why I had to write this newsletter…it simply isn’t as bad as some of the reviews might lead you to believe. I struggled for a minute to come up with what the larger point might be. Rich people are bad. Middle class people are bad. And what I came up with is…I don’t think there is a point. Or, rather, people involved in the film might say there’s a point, but I think that if you really tested that belief it wouldn’t hold (bath)water. If you’re watching this as a film that is purely fun and silly, then I think it’s successful. And, as someone who spent the better part of a year trying very hard to write a book that was purely fun and silly, that’s not nothing.

As a dark and disturbing look at…anything, though, I do not think it succeeds. I couldn’t help contrasting it with Eileen, a movie I wasn’t sure I liked at first but now can’t stop talking about. Eileen actually is surprising. I found Anne Hathaway’s blonde wig far more shocking than anything that happened in Saltburn. It’s also effortlessly dark, pretty gross, and has an ending that somehow feels inevitable and gratifyingly unexpected. It’s a messy, imperfect movie, but one that feels certain of what it wants to do, which is more than I can say for Saltburn.

One more thing: what the heck happened to Duncan, the butler? He’s lurking in the background of every scene, suspicious of Oliver from the get go. He knows this guy is up to something. When Oliver later meets up with Felix’s mom, he even asks, “Is Duncan still there?” and she says he is. So…why was he never mentioned again? As Chekhov once said, “If in the first act a suspicious butler shows up, then by the end he should catch the pervy hero and ruin his plans.”

I really thought he would be involved in some way, and this Vulture piece has a few thoughts on it that I found interesting. In an interview, Emerald Fennell mentions both Duncan and Farleigh as people who are still out there, who know Oliver’s secrets, and who could come back to screw everything up for him. But that’s simply not present in the story, and not putting that information in the film itself is a bewildering choice (unless she was forced to cut some scenes for time/plot reasons and is now trying to spin it as something that makes sense, which I understand). What are we doing here? Setting up a sequel? Saltburn 2: Saltburnier. Tagline: He’s so crazzzzzy! I love him!!! 

I can say whatever I want about how I found Saltburn ultimately unsatisfying, but the truth remains: I was thinking about it so much that I had to write an entire newsletter about it, even though I have another one scheduled. Saltburn is my Felix! Maybe I AM Oliver after all (I’M NOT).

Please do let me know what you thought, whether you loved or hated it. I would honestly love to hear your passionate defenses or scathing takedowns. Saltburn is currently streaming on Amazon.