Saltburn on Prime Video: what is the film with Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi worth?
A student of modest origin spends the summer with a wealthy friend… A mock-Gothic tale as flashy and hollow as the world it depicts.
Barry Keoghan inviting himself into a bourgeois family to witness its ruin? We are not in Killing of the sacred deer by Yorgos Lanthimos, but in Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s second feature film after Promising Young Woman. We could also be in a update contemporary of classics sixties as Full Sun Or Theorem, as the film repeats conventional themes and motifs.
Saltburn, this is the name of the immense property in the heart of the English countryside where Oliver (Barry Keoghan), a shy Oxford student from a poverty-stricken family, was invited to spend the summer by his friend Felix, a hunky superstar. of the campus (the indeed irresistible Jacob Elordiin full post-Euphoria, and who also plays Elvis these days at Sofia Coppola). A season of “debauchery” will follow (we play tennis in a tuxedo while drinking champagne, that kind), of various sexual attractions, of hidden class struggle and of social humiliation.
To describe this world mixing degenerate aristocratic morals and nouveau riche vulgarity, Fennell embraces the mannerisms of his characters and creates a flashy film, full of flashy and supposedly provocative scenes (cunnilingus in the moonlight, face smeared with blood menstrual…), a vaguely gothic tale, noisy and bling, which moves in all directions hoping that adjectives like “poisonous” or “crazy” will be attached to it. It all ends with a plot pirouette so cheesy that we want to recommend the film just so you see it, and laugh about it afterwards.
By Emerald Fennell • With Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike… • Duration 2h11 • Available December 22 on Prime Video
