Everyman
Let us not go and see Saltburn, for it is a silly film.
Oliver, a working class boy (Barry Keoghan, who takes all his clothes off in the final scene) is struggling to make friends at Hogwarts Oxford but unexpectedly inveigles himself into the orbit of a toff, Felix (Jacob Elordi who keeps his pants on). After Oliver's father dies, Felix generously invites him to spend the summer with his parents (Richard E Grant and Rosamund Pike, obviously) who live in a stately home called Saltburn. There is a sinister butler, a suit of armour, paintings of "dead rellies" on the walls, and a big bathroom without a lock on the door. The family are more Nancy Mitford than P.G Wodehouse: endlessly sweary, vulgar and bitchy. The performances are uniformly watchable, and I liked the uniformly dislikable cast of characters. Elordi exudes so much charisma and magnetism that next year he is going to have a go at being Elvis Presley. Barry Keoghan embodies the repressed, tongue-tied Irish guy exactly as well as he did in his last film and his film before that. There is some suspicion that the show only exists so that Grant and Pike can steal it.
It isn't clear if Saltburn was specifically conceived as an anti-Brideshead, but teddy-bears feature prominently. The film lampshades its more obvious cultural reference points: we are told that Waugh was obsessed with the place, and that a lot of people think that Felix's Mum was turned into a song by Jarvis Cocker. Everyone reads Harry Potter and listens to Britpop just in case they start to think they've slipped back to the 1930s.
For an hour and a half it is moderately interesting: there is a genuine tension around whether Felix is infatuated with Oliver or Oliver is infatuated with Felix. Oliver has a sequence of sexual and quasi-sexual encounters with characters of various genders involving slightly more bodily fluids than I felt entirely comfortable with. But a film is doing badly if some of the darkly erotic scenes elicit suppressed giggles from the audience, and if the main "reveal" makes your reviewer shout "oh, fuck off." (Remember the chap who wrote "No they didn't" after every line in To The Lighthouse?)
When Oliver becomes slightly too down-and-dirty with Felix's sister's menstrual blood, he says that he doesn't mind because he is a vampire, and it crossed my mind that the film was really going to have a supernatural resolution. Which would have been a good deal more believable than what actually happens.
The tragi-comic climax takes place at the centre of a literal labyrinth, because of course it does.
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
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