Review: ‘Saltburn’ Misses the Mark
Words by Erin Clark / Edited by Mia Stapleton
Saltburn: soulless and empty pomp, hollow metaphors and assuming viewer ignorance.
I’m sat in Hyde Park Picture House’s basement theatre, waiting for my screening of ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ to begin. As a Letterboxd addict, and someone who spends a considerable amount of time around a partner with a film degree, it’s not often that I miss the announcement of an upcoming film. But Saltburn seemed to almost slip past me. Had I not seen the trailer before my screening on that fateful night, it possibly would have. This film seemed to promise everything – Barry Keoghan, Richard E. Grant, the old English font, the boxy 1.33:1 framing– oh, the whimsy, the peculiarity, the Sandy Liang ribbons, ‘The Last Dinner Party’ of it all! I am sick of boring films, with the rolling hills of Hollywood seeming only to produce franchise after franchise, blah, blah, blah– so to see a trailer for a film that seemed to tick a lot of boxes for me definitely piqued my interest.
Admittedly, the more I found out about it, the less I was anticipating seeing the film– so much so that I reached the point where I entered the cinema screen with a preconceived notion that I would not like this film. Maybe I’d have saved myself nearly a tenner by not going, but something about it reeled me in. Before I elaborate on my several problems with this film, I’d like to emphasise and praise that, in retrospect, the reeling factor for me was the cinematography. The temporal setting of the film is aesthetically pleasing– although it’s done with very little explanation– working to demonstrate the grit, the clunkiness, and the grime of mid-2000s university culture. The film looks beautiful, with its foreboding landscapes, kitsch clothing, and experimentation with lighting, sealed with saturated colour grading which emphasises its ‘time-capsule’ nature. But look or think any further, and the cracks start to show. Here we go. I fear that these opinions may put a target on my back.
The film utilises a lot of shock tactics to get people in seats, but once you look past that and wipe the frost off the glass of the film, there’s actually nothing there. Nothing worth writing home about, anyway. The whole film seems like a badly written piece of Tumblr fanfiction, I took major issue with a certain scene in the garden involving blood and ‘vampires’– with dialogue that seemed ripped straight out of a horrendous ‘X Reader’ written by a 16-year- old. Adding to what I’m coining the ‘badly written Tumblr fanfiction’ allegations, is the fact that not a single character is explored, and so everyone is immeasurably one-dimensional and reduced to the very base-level definitions of their character archetype. When each character is left unexplored, an audience ultimately doesn’t care about their fate, and most of all it’s just fucking boring.
My main issue with this film is in its thinking that it is revolutionary. This isn’t new, but it markets itself to be. I’m all for a cinematic reference and I’m not naïve enough to believe that all cinema is new and revolutionary, but there’s a difference between being transparent with references and influences– and packaging it in Barry Keoghan wrapping paper, with a shiny red bow and a label that reads ‘Never Done Before!’ Every interview I have watched with director Emerald Fennel reads as her reciting the Lady Gaga ‘Talented, brilliant, incredible, etc.’ with reference to herself. Fennel is an absolute master of bad and predictable ‘plot twists,’ in the worst possible way – her films constantly believe they are ahead of you and continuously flaunt their empty arrogance at this falsehood.
This time, the butt of the joke is the working class; cheers Emerald! On top of this, I really don’t know what possessed Emerald Fennel, posh-privately-educated-daughter-of-a-jewellery-designer, to write a working-class character to be played by a working-class actor, for the message of the film to ultimately be ‘posh people are ultimately always benevolent’ and ‘if poor people could fuck you over, they would in a heartbeat,’ disguised under a shallow and unexplored queer ‘romance’? Posh lady who was born into, and was happy enough to ride nepotist waves of the life that she’s attempting to produce an effective piece of satire about? Cool. From the caricature of working-class parents being drug-addicts and alcohol-dependent and working-class people having to result to getting all of their clothes from charity shops to the empty ‘satire’ surrounding Merseyside being desolate and its people in ‘ruin’; the class politics that Emerald Fennel truly thinks she’s nailed, in reality, doesn’t even get off of the perfectly manicured ground of the stately home.
