Saltburn (2023)

Rated R for just about everything.  It's extremely sexually explicit, but I could argue that it was probably less explicit than people made it out to be.  (I'll talk about that later.) There is nudity, drug use, violence, gore, suicide, murder, and lots of sexual acts.  I know.  I just said it wasn't that much. Again, I'll talk about that.  Just know that it isn't necessarily for the faint of heart.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Emerald Fennell

Okay, you guys made me think that I was going to watch Salo again or something.  (Now you know not only that I watched Salo at one point, but that I was willing to do so again because people kept on asking me about this movie.)  I don't get a lot of requests for movies.  But oh-my-goodness, people kept asking me about Saltburn.  I didn't want to dismiss it.  I know that people have strong opinions on the movie.  I'll tell you what.  It's pretty good.

Now, I know that I'm blaspheming on some level here.  I bet that if I walked into the video store back in the day, I'd probably get ripped apart for liking Saltburn.  I don't quite know why I would get ripped apart.  I just get the vibe that it is gauche and basic to like this movie.  Objectively, it's a gorgeously shot film with solid acting and an interesting story.  Is it perfect?  I don't know.  I don't think so.  There's a part that I'm going to discuss, but part of that I'm still unpacking.  Hopefully, I can process a lot of that as I write, so maybe we'll determine whether one of my complaints is valid or if it is just a scene that doesn't belong in the movie.  I don't know everything.  I just pretend that I do.

First of all, let's talk about graphic content.  It is graphic.  I won't deny that it is graphic.  I actually hate that I'm not more scandalized by this.  Honestly, it isn't an attempt to be a flex or anything.  I've now seen so many horrorshows out there that I kind of hate that I'm desensitized to a lot of stuff.  But everyone looks at you when you say that you've seen Saltburn like you are some kind of deviant.  This is a movie about people being cruel, often sexually cruel, to one another.  And you absolutely should be scandalized by the things that happen in this movie. But that feeling comes with a mixture of investment, empathy, and imagination.  If you are invested in the story and see these as real people doing these real things, it comes across as brutal.  I get that. But these shots are gross only if you think that the actors are really doing those things.  I'm going to use the code that everyone else is doing to describe "the scene."  I'm talking about "the bathtub scene."  I was ready for a lot worse than that.  You know that's just water, right?  It's just water.  I know that is being incredibly dismissive.  After all, The Thing special effects still scare me and I'm aware that those are just gross looking puppets.  But my brain instantly distanced itself from what people thought was going on and I was able to power through a lot of those scenes without cringing too much.

Here's the big victory that Saltburn won that should be noted.  I'm not a big fan of The Talented Mr. Ripley model of story.  Fundamentally, Saltburn is just a more sexually explicit Talented Mr. Ripley.  (Also, the other Ripley movies, including the one that is coming out soon.) My buddy in high school was obsessed with that movie and it didn't do much for me.  Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley also opened the door for similar films.  The film I'm kind of talking about is the creepy outsider lusting not only after a person, but after a person's entire lifestyle.  Through emotional manipulation and cruelty, this person weaves themselves into someone else's lives,coveting that life until it is theirs.  The thing that the Ripley movies always did, though, was to leave their protagonist (in the sense that we're following this character's goals, not in a heroic sense) a blank slate.  We know so little about Ripley.  Often, we have to identify with the object of their desire and Ripley becomes this menacing figure.  

But with Saltburn, Oliver is with us the most in the story.  We don't know most things about Oliver until the end.  (I want to discuss that a bit.)  Oliver is our protagonist.  We see him in his ups and downs.  Through the course of the story, it almost feels like there are two Olivers.  It feels like the real Oliver is the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses character.  He does anything for love and attention because he's been starved for that.  Man, that character is relatable as heck.  He knows he's out of Felix's league and he's constantly paddling to keep up. But that's why Oliver's other personality is so horrifying.  He shows up first with Venetia in the garden and it is so polarizing compared to the first guy.  We have to wonder which character is the real Oliver and which one is the mask.  As the story progresses, ultimately solidifying this with a retelling of the story in the final act, we find out that the mastermind latter character is the real Oliver and that the sympathetic nerd is something completely fictional.  Ripley doesn't really give you a ton by design.  I like knowing the complete psychopathy of Oliver though.

But I did say that one scene frustrated me.  The bathtub scene is such a memorable scene because of the disgusting sensory experience that it elicits.  The bathtub scene exists because the movie outright lies to us at the beginning.  I don't like that.  I had a discussion and it was posited that the movie never really lied to us, but I don't know if that works either.  I'm being too cryptic.  I apologize.  Keep the bathtub scene in the back of your mind for this part.  The movie bookends with a parallel scene.  The opening of the film is Ollie confessing a deep intense love for Felix.  He says something along the lines of "I am not in love with him.  I love him."  The phrase "I love him" repeats, mirroring Oliver's obsession with Felix.  The film ends with Oliver, grown up and standing over Elsbeth's comatose body starting with "I love him" and it devolves into "I never loved him."  Eventually, he chants how much he always hated all of them, implying that Oliver was always playing the long game, bilking the Catton family out of their undeserved estate.  Now, here's my problem.

The bathtub scene was something done alone.  What graphic thing that Oliver does over the grave kind of works, despite being alone because I can see that all of the evil that Oliver does to the Catton family as a form of sexual assault.  I get that. But the bathtub scene almost doesn't work with that.  Oliver told us that he loved Felix, so the bathtub scene works.  But if he never loved Felix, if all of that was an act to assert dominance, I don't think he would do the bathtub scene.  Now, if I'm really getting into the nuance of the scene, it could have been an opening salvo as his power starts to emerge.  But it seemed that the bathtub scene happens because of his own arousal to the spying that he just perpetrated.  I don't know.  I'm a little worried that the bathtub scene was only left in the movie both as a misdirect (which would make it unearned) and for shock value.  After all, I kept on hearing about the bathtub scene.  It just seemed to make less sense knowing what I know about the ending of the film.  

But the movie just mostly works.  Every casting choice is perfect.  Golly, I don't know how I got a movie that was so demented that somehow triggered my sympathy and my disdain at the same time.  Like, Oliver is absolutely evil.  But his target constantly does things that makes Oliver look human by comparison.  Felix doesn't know that Oliver is a sociopath.  Felix is treating Oliver like a pet.  The constant reminder of a previous guest that Felix treated like a pet and then disposed of makes this entire scenario a story of comeuppence.  Absolutely Oliver is a monster.  But no one knew that Oliver was a monster, so the events that unfolded present like a very specific horror story.  Honestly, it's why horror movies tend to make victims bad people. They break a rule; Jason gets them.  In this case, we've changed the rules of what makes a victim, but there is no final girl.  We almost celebrate Jason as victor and it's really messed up.  

​But that's why we break formula sometimes.