‘Saltburn’-esque Scammers Will Always Be in Style

“I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody,” Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley tells his perplexed but sympathetic lover (Jack Davenport) in The Talented Mr. Ripley’s final scene, not long before smothering the life out of him with a regretful sob. (Poor Tom; if only romance and identity theft weren’t so fiendishly incompatible.) 

What the patron saint of toothy sociopathy and class transgression finds, of course, is that fake somebody-ness, while extremely fun, is also a lot of work. It requires vigilance, wit, fortitude; sometimes, alas, murder. And yet the Ripleys and Gatsbys of the world carry on, scheming and plotting and slouching toward infamy. And we keep watching them: Saltburn, the second film from millennial provocateur Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), bowed in limited release this past weekend after a long, lascivious wink of a press campaign to strong box office returns and decidedly mixed reviews.

Saltburn’s storyline is an immediately familiar one, essentially a Ripley remix. Boy meets boy, one poor-ish, one rich; poor boy befriends, embeds, and eventually envelops rich boy’s entire existence like a vampire squid. Here, The Banshees of Inisherin’s Barry Keoghan plays the lowly interloper as an incoming freshman at Oxford circa 2006, a gawky scholarship kid named Oliver Quick whose murky origin story includes addict parents so far gone he’s essentially an orphan. Jacob Elordi (Priscilla, Euphoria) is the campus demigod, Felix Catton—a posh cut-glass dreamboat whose powers of seduction are such that he need only pluck a lucky girl from the crowd at the end of the night, like a winning lottery ticket.  

Felix has everything Oliver doesn’t: friends, money, an innate ease in his body and his place in the world. But he is also unusually, almost inexplicably kind: When Oliver does him a small favor one day, Felix repays him in pure social currency, opening a door to the glamorous swirl of parties, pub nights, and casual privilege that he already wears like a birthright. No one needs a Forbes list to take the measure of their relative worth; it’s all spelled out in the accents and accouterments, as rigidly codified as any formal caste system. (It helps, too, that this all takes place pre-social media, though markers of the early aughts setting manifest mostly via the barbell in Felix’s aristocratic eyebrow and a lot of MGMT and Cold War Kids on the soundtrack.)

When the school year ends, Felix extends an invitation to join his family at their vast country estate, Saltburn, and so the real games begin: While Oliver scrambles to master the unspoken rules of dinner jackets, butlers, and breakfast sideboards, the novelty of his presence works like a balm on the Cattons, or at least a cat toy for them to bat around. Fennell pulls droll performances from Richard E. Grant as the distracted, bobbling paterfamilias, Rosamund Pike as his blithely self-satisfied wife, and Conversations With Friends’ Alison Oliver as Felix’s little sister, a bleached blonde baby nihilist with a seemingly endless supply of sequins and cigarettes. (Why Pike doesn’t make more comedies is a mystery for our times; her Elspeth operates at God-level esprit de snob.)

Elordi brings both heady It boy charisma and a touch of real, injured humanity to Felix, even as he remains mostly a gorgeous object for the camera to caress. And Keoghan unearths layers of pathos and tenderness that don’t really exist in Fennell’s glossy, willfully provocative script, which often works overtime to shock. (Bodily fluids have rarely been squirted, spattered, or hoovered up with such scatological glee.) There’s something atypically movie-starish, almost pugilistic about the Irish actor’s physical presence; he often looks like he’s just been stung about the face by bees, sexily. But his commitment somehow grounds the movie, even as it wobbles and tilts toward full telenovela absurdity.