Saltburn (2023)

I'll make the case for Saltburn as inversion of the hero arc. The film plays without expectations, coding our main character in all the ways villains have been coded in the cinematic canon and then making him triumphant and heroic despite all that we have witnessed. Saltburn delights in upending all that movie audiences expect from narratives and giving it back to us in ways that are uncomfortable. It's a little bit Teorema, a little but Talented Mr. Ripley, and a little bit Funny Games, all rolled into a subversive slap in the face that is designed to make you question all that you understand about good guys and bad guys and how morality plays play out. 

The simple summation of the plot is how a poor, outcast Oxford student becomes obsessed with the popular rich kid and insinuates himself into his targets life with disastrous results. But that is just the framework for what Fennell is truly spinning here. She manages to get underneath the way audiences respond to triggers and cues in films and upend them, making us love who we normally hate and hate who we normally love or at least be confused about it. 

Normally we would side with the poor underdog against the elite bastards. That's how we are taught to approach these stories and we pat ourselves on the back for it while we subconsciously cheer on the real world millionaires in their exploitation of the world. But she flips this by giving us so many cues to dislike the usurper. She casts Keoghan as Oliver and makes him as creepy and queer coded as possible. We are purposefully disgusted by his actions cause they are too overtly sexual, involve behavior we may consider degrading (and queer, don't forget that), and he does the sorts of things we are supposed to be judgemental of that we would normally see the villain do. 

Now to get us back on his side, Fennell could have easily made his targets cartoonishly awful adversaries. We are used to movies where the villains are fiendish posh parasites and we can pat ourselves on the back for wanting to see their comeuppance. But she paints the object of Oliver's affection, Felix, not only as impossibly attractive (in an A&F model sort of way) and generally decent, if somewhat bland, sometimes vapid, but rather realistically human. She crafts the Cattons as individuals whose only real sin is the privilege they enjoy, a privilege that is extreme and essentially soul eroding, but she doesn't code them in the way the evil millionaires are usually portrayed in films. 

It's hard to explain the lengths Fennell goes to mess with the signals we are so used to interpreting and fucking with our emotional responses. In a pivotal scene Oliver is wearing horns (like a devil) while Felix is wearing wings (like an angel) and yet they are inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream party thrown in Oliver's honour meaning Oliver is playing the likeable Puck while Felix is a mischievous fairy. We are constantly being pulled in different directions. So much of film language is about playing into our expectations and Saltburn seems dedicated to messing with those. So when the ending, a triumphant reordering of the universe, reveals its plot spinning out we find ourselves rooting for the what we "shouldn't" or perhaps we should? Saltburn gets us to reinterpret all we know about how we evaluate good and bad despite ourselves. 

And this is in itself inherently queer. The film is queering our hero narratives so that we come out the end with a sublime celebration of revolution on a personal level, something that queer people have strived for for centuries. I am not aware of Fennell's identification but her screenplay and film and her primarily straight cast, have made one of the queerest films, joyfully queer films, I have seen in a long time. 

I think the final scene in this film may be my favourite of any of the year. It is blissful yet dark, hopeful yet bitter, tragic and triumphant all at once and sums up all that Saltburn has done to us in its two hours and ten minutes of decadence and reclamation. Keoghan is masterful (he rarely isn't) and he and Fennell have created one of the most fascinating cinematic characters I've seen. The film is perhaps a bit messy in revealing its twists but that's part of the play as well. What it accomplishes with the audience's emotions is a little miracle. 

Saltburn

Starring: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan

Writer/Director: Emerald Fennell