Film Review - Saltburn (2023)

Saltburn is the new film by Emerald Fennell who made a big splash and won an Oscar for her 2020 film Promising Young Woman, this film stars Barry Keoghan as Oliver, a top graduate student at Oxford University who befriends a young man named Felix (Jacob Elordi) but when Oliver finds himself without a home for the Summer Felix invites to his home manor called Saltburn where his strange family (Rosamund Pike, Richard E Grant, Carey Mulligan, Archie Madekwe and Alison Oliver) reside.

I was looking forward to this movie mainly because I loved Promising Young Woman when I got to see it in early 2021, Fennell showed a lot of promise as a new emerging talent and told a tale that felt like it tapped into some very real fears I’m sure her and most women have at some point in their life and so I was keen to see what deliciousness she would cook up next.

Sadly this is another case like Olivia Wilde’s film last year Don’t Worry Darling of the Sophomore Slump striking again as while I was watching this film unfold I kept thinking to myself “How on Earth can a film this pretentious and full of itself also be this dull and uninteresting?” as while the scenes at Oxford are fine they just went on for far too long and I didn’t really find them interesting.

Then again nor did I find the scenes at Saltburn Manor interesting either and this leads me to my first main problem with this movie, none of the characters here I found engaging in the slightest and the rich family in the manor felt more like caricatures than actual characters like you see in Ready or Not or the first Knives Out film, Pike and Grant are great actors but it feels like they are doing cartoon characters with Pike feeling like the ditzy trophy wife and Grant who has a peculiar way of talking already is doing that dialed up to 12 with his line. Readings. Like this.. in that voice he has and it really gets tiresome.

Mulligan who delivered career best work in Promising Young Woman is wasted here and it honestly feels like she came and did this on a day off a year or two back and put on the costume, did her lines and then went again and it feels like a waste to have someone who is doing great work right now be given a thankless and nothing character, Madekwe just sits around and says pithy lines like he’s part of the Social Golf Club from the Simpsons and Oliver is okay but doesn’t really get a lot to do.

But the biggest waste here is Keoghan who is a great actor and everything I’ve seen him in up to this point he’s delivered great work but here he is crushingly boring with his misfitting glasses and soft talking, most of the time I kept thinking that someone like Taron Egerton should’ve played this role instead as I never really believed Keoghan’s character came from a salt of the earth background.

But the one person I did like was Jacob Elordi and watching him here I thought to myself “This kid is going to be a star” and with this and Priscilla to end the year it seems that promise is starting to bear fruit and I will be keen to see what he does next as he has charisma and charm and can deliver drama and humour well.

And so that was Saltburn and I wanted this to be more than it was in terms of its risqué, storytelling and characters but the risqué felt dialed back and the storytelling and characters became dull and uninteresting, this is easily my biggest disappointment of 2023, 1 out of 5.