Murder on the Cutting Room Floor – Saltburn Review

Jan 9

★★☆☆☆

On Saltburn.

Saltburn.

The titular North England estate where most of the film takes place. Made up of wood-paneled walls, regal English libraries, and a labyrinthine garden maze, Saltburn is much more than the beautiful backdrop for a story about Oliver Quick, a lonely Oxford student and his love for his popular classmate, Felix Catton.

And it’s more than just the film’s title. Saltburn is a feeling. A compound feeling where everything—beauty, senses, taste, salt—is so frontloaded and rabid, that you’ve hardly realized you’ve just witnessed a story burn to the ground.

Here is a movie with just about everything to show for itself. Breathtaking cinematography. Sensational colors. Mind-blowing frames and shots. Visceral tones and ambience. Great acting. Intrigue. Impeccable pacing. Call it your salt.

One of the most beautiful-looking films I’ve seen in recent memory.

At the same time, here is a movie with practically nothing to say by the time the credits roll. A movie that you look back on and realize it’s torched everything it’s built, all of its potential, and there’s nothing left behind besides smoke in mirrors.

Saltburn is just that. A compound word that perfectly describes a film that sure looks and sort of tastes good, but is really just scorched earth. There is very little there behind all the tricks of light, the plumes of cigarette smoke. You just know that something in the film, and therefore you, have been cauterized for the worse. Saltburn encapsulates how it feels to watch this film and be torn in two by its beautiful, but ultimately, empty, absurdity. This is what happens when you prioritize style over substance. When the most important thing, the story, gets left on the cutting room floor.

The Saltburn Maze

How did we end up with a two-hour movie that looks fantastic, but is just so silly? How have we come to waste such unique and incredible cinematography and talent in pursuit of art that’s meme-able? Art with a viral quality so obvious and contrived?

Saltburn should have worked. It really should have. Oscar-winner Emerald Fennell’s striking film about a young, modest, and lonely Oxford student named Oliver (Barry Keoghan) pining for a true friend should have worked. I loved watching Oliver meet and become enchanted by his classmate Felix (Jacob Elordi). I blushed when the two struck up an unlikely friendship. I shrieked with pleasure when Felix invited Oliver to stay with him and his family at their estate in Saltburn. I marveled at Saltburn’s beauty, its eerie butlers, the Shining-esque maze foreshadowing, and the strange family quirks that suggest nothing is quite at as it seems.

All this beauty must lead somewhere, right?

On the surface, Saltburn had all the fixings of an incredible film. It quickly established that its cinematography and style would be something to talk about for a long time. But style, in the case of Saltburn, easily becomes a double-edged sword. On one end, its style creates a viewing experience so arresting, impressive, and memorable. On the other end, such style without a story or redeemable characters to fall back on quickly becomes one of the film’s few saving graces. Its style is so overly depended upon that it ultimately becomes a caricature of itself. Hokey.

Am I just being critical? Sure. I guess I’m just fed up with being tricked into thinking a beautiful film is a good film.

But even still, I can admit that a movie can’t be all style. I can’t lie and say Saltburn didn’t at least attempt to explore some poignant and relevant themes.

There’s the obvious theme of coming of age amidst overwhelming loneliness. Oliver’s demure nature, his inability to really connect with those around him, his desire for companionship. These are all things audiences can relate to and empathize with. Oliver’s tragic childhood is resonant for many, and Barry Keoghan gives a such a powerful performance of this troubled young man that you just want to reach into the screen and hold him.

We ache with Oliver when we learn about his addict parents, the first time he ever shoved his fingers down his mother’s throat to prevent an overdose being just eight-years-old. We want to protect and provide for Oliver, whose lonely and filthy and impoverished childhood turned him into a young man who can’t stand chaos or even an empty cookie bag on the floor. We feel just as out of place as he walks through the halls of Oxford and Saltburn, desiring a kind of comfort and lifestyle he’ll never come close to having. Our hearts break when Oliver learns his father has died. That he has no friends or siblings to turn to. Nobody but good ol’ Felix, who’s taken to him.

And then our hearts break again when we learned we’ve been lied to and manipulated all along. About two-thirds of the way through, a clever twist reveals that Oliver is not at all the broken and traumatized young man we thought we knew. In fact, he comes from a perfectly fine, well-adjusted, middle class family. His mother spends all morning cooking lunch for him, and he’s the top student at Oxford. He has sisters, and a proud, loving, living father.

Oliver isn’t down and out. He isn’t riddled with childhood trauma. He, as Felix so perfectly puts it, “is a liar.” He has lied to all of us to win our affection.

This is where Saltburn truly shines. It’s when we learn Oliver’s true background and are betrayed that we feel undeniably moved, or changed. We have been fooled, and it hurts.

But Saltburn is clever. It packs on the pity, and we’re bombarded with Oliver’s complete and utter shame about having lied to the only friend he ever had. Felix, and us. Oliver’s shame of having been found out is palpable and real. Barry’s performance is so heartbreaking and cringey, we can’t help but feel somewhat forgiving. Understanding of a time we, too, might have bent the truth to garner sympathy. This revelation, along with Oliver’s shame and emotional strife, are the most honest things about the film. And we realize that perhaps this is the most sinister thing a person can do—fabricate trauma and lie to someone for affection.

This is when Oliver is perhaps the most dangerous. The scariest.

How betrayed we all felt when we watched Oliver’s mother open her arms to give him a giant Betty Crocker hug. We don’t know Oliver at all! This person we so dearly wanted to protect. Cared for so much. Who is he? How could he do this to us? This is the true fear, heartbreak, and emotional turmoil of Saltburn.

It is not what it actually ends up being. In another plot twist near the film’s resolution, we actually learn that Oliver has meant to calculate his deceit all along. And while Oliver might not have intended for Felix to uncover the truth about his background, he did intend on orchestrating their meet-cute. He did intend on manipulating Felix so that he might weasel his way into Felix’s inner circle. He did intend to evoke pity and lie about his childhood and inability to return home, so he can infiltrate the entire Catton family and eventually seize the Saltburn estate after—yep—killing them off one by one.

The maze in Saltburn is not the one in the courtyard. It’s the one with all the twists and turns, with no real center. What the hell just happened? Oliver has been a mastermind killer?

God, I had high hopes for Saltburn.

I was genuinely moved and hurt by Oliver’s lies. The lies were despicable, but they may be forgivable. They may be understandable. He just wanted so badly to fit in, to have a friend. To get the attention of someone he admired. That kind of motivation is real. It is human. It’s where Saltburn should have stayed and explored.

To discover that it would only get swallowed up by the film’s larger “gotcha” narrative was so disappointing. To have Oliver turn out to be some sort of evil, murderous mastermind is contrived and lazy. Far more fitting of a James Bond or comic book villain than it is of a lonely young man who simply wants more for himself. To suggest a person is hateful enough to kill an entire family to move into their estate and live the life of luxury isn’t nuanced or sinister or hardly even shocking. It’s tiresome.

What an utter and eye-rolling disappointment to watch the turn Saltburn makes with its narrative and Oliver’s character. We’re forced into thinking this eat-the-rich story is the best it can achieve when we’ve already seen the real damage Oliver can actually do. When we’ve already felt how much hurt he can inflict.

Besides, you can’t eat the rich when the oppressed is a white male from an obviously middle-class family with the means to send him to Oxford. I mean, that one was just a swing and a miss.

Driven (Mad) By Love. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

So what turns the “shy” and “lonely” Oliver into a full-blown psycho killer? If we can’t chuck it up to an eat-the-rich motivation, then what can we look to? What drives Oliver to orchestrate the systemic deaths of an entire family and an estate seizure?

In a voiceover (where we learn that Oliver is actually speaking over the comatose body of Mrs. Elsbeth Catton [Rosamind Pike]), Oliver reveals he was driven to commit such heinous acts by his all-consuming love for Felix.

Is killing someone and their entire family what you do when you love someone? Is lying what you do when you love someone? Is usurping their home and dancing naked through the halls what you do?

Just as Saltburn’s “I’ve-been-evil-all-along” narrative is tiresome, so is its “love-drives-you-mad-enough-to-kill-them” narrative. I find no wonder, no nuance, no patience for those types of things these days. I find it dull, trying to turn love so blatantly bloody for no real reason other than gotcha-ism. How can any of this be “love” anyway, when it’s portrayed so deviantly?

I suppose now is a good time to touch on how Saltburn completely misses its chance to portray queer love. Or, I suppose it portrays it. But not in a good way.

Besides the fact that this love is used as the scapegoat for literal murder, Oliver’s love for Felix is depicted as so deviant, so wicked, it’s doing queer love a massive disservice. Why does Oliver so shamefully watch Felix pleasure himself in the bathtub, only to secretly drink the cum-bathwater before it drains? Can you call this pining? Or is it just perverted? Why show Oliver defile, corrupt, and essentially rape Felix’s grave? Is that anyone’s idea of romance? Or is it just abhorrent? Why show Oliver jump onto the bed of another man in the middle of the night, only to forcefully threaten a man into submission and then perform nonconsensual sexual acts on him?

This depiction of queer “love” isn’t singing the song it thinks it’s singing. It’s forcing audiences to turn their heads, close their eyes, turn off the movie, or walk right out. So why? Why portray queer love as so deviant when it can be so beautiful? So understated and powerful? Hasn’t queer love suffered enough slander?

What happened to that playful, yet romantically-charged kiss on the cheek Felix gives Oliver?

Where is the heart in Saltburn?

Perhaps it’s given itself over to what Oliver actually suggests is motivating him.

Moments later, in the same voiceover, Oliver also reveals that he was equally driven by his hate for Felix. His hate, in fact, for the entire Catton family. So even worse, his motivations are split in half, in direct opposition. That ol’ love/hate thing.

This isn’t complex. This isn’t nuanced. It’s canceled each other out. And now you’ve murdered over nothing.

Saltburn has effectively accomplished the opposite of what it set out to do with Oliver from the very beginning—I’ve absolutely zero empathy or sympathy for him.

When All Else Fails, Go For the Grave

What does it take to move an audience these days?

Drinking cum-bathwater? Bloody cunnilingus? Having sex with a literal grave?

When you’ve vivisected your main character down to a shell of hisself, debunked your own motivations, killed off everyone else, and eliminated any trace of sympathy or redemption, what is there to do but attempt to drive nuance for the sake of distraction?

Without a real story or character to hold onto, you must resort to drastic contrivances and a sensory onslaught to carry audiences from one scene to the next. You’re left with scenes like Oliver going down on a girl on her period, not because it adds any depth or meaning but because it piques an audience’s morbid curiosities. You’re left with no choice but to include a scene of Barry Keoghan defile and have sex with a literal grave, the soil still fresh and wet with rain. And it’s just so unshocking that Oliver would do such heinous things. There is nothing else for his character to do. Learn about himself. So of course it ends with a long dance scene wherein Oliver prances around Saltburn entirely naked.

When you try to force-feed nuance and wedge avant-gardeism into every frame, you get films like Saltburn. You get scenes like this.

Here lies a motivation-less man defiling and having sex with the grave of the man he loved and, for some reason, murdered.

Saltburn relies on these antics to distract from the fact it has completely pulled the rug out from under us. To distract us from the fact that it has refused to go where it really hurts: a person’s loneliness. A person’s desperation for companionship and belonging. A person’s self consciousness and far-fetched desires.

I’m supposed to just accept that Oliver simply wanted a big house to himself?

Nah.

But Maybe I’m the Problem

Part of me wonders if maybe this aimlessness is its genius. If maybe, all we’re supposed to see and care about, is the beauty and shock and color and light. Maybe it’s asking us to bask in beauty for but a moment. Wouldn’t that be okay?

Is beauty and style sometimes enough? Is it okay to have a straight-up bombastic, flamboyant, sexy movie? Can we simply watch Jacob Elordi snort lines whilst wearing angel wings? Can we kill the meaning and just watch Barry Keoghan dance around a beautiful home with his dick out? Might we just indulge ourselves, dance in the colorful light, and lean into the sensual, sensational, hedonist parts of ourselves? What if it it is all for naught? Is that so bad?

Maybe Saltburn meant to murder everything on the cutting room floor.

We’re all going to die anyway, aren’t we?

If Saltburn has anything to say about it, perhaps it’s this:

Fuck it.

Michelle Han-Taylor