After Barry Keoghan won an Oscar nomination last year for his work as the cop’s abused and ill-fated son in The Banshees of Inisherin, people learned about his tortured past. This short-statured actor with a busted nose had gone from being orphaned at 12 and bouncing around foster homes to international stardom.
Those of us in the know were aware of the Irishman before that, for his ability to play both Americans (like the teen who places a curse on a family in The Killing of a Sacred Deer) and Englishmen (the boy who takes an unfortunate fall in Dunkirk). His one scene in The Green Knight further contributed to the air of magic in that film, and of course he showed up at the end of The Batman as a prisoner we’re meant to take as the Joker. He’s the perfect actor to play the creepy, sexually fluid antihero of the oh-so-very-British social satire Saltburn, which hits our multiplexes this weekend. If The Talented Mr. Ripley and Parasite had a baby, and then Brideshead Revisited and Call Me by Your Name had a baby, and then those babies had a baby, it would be this film.
Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a student who arrives at Oxford in the mid-2000s and is promptly treated like crap for his thick Merseyside accent and his secondhand clothes. One of the few people who doesn’t is Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who takes pity on him. After Oliver’s father dies in a drunken fall, Felix invites him to spend summer vacation at his family’s palatial country estate, called Saltburn. The movie opens with Oliver telling the camera, “I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him.” His use of the past tense might lead you to think that something terrible has happened, but you’d be wrong. A whole bunch of terrible things will happen after Oliver arrives.
This is Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman, and it’s somehow even meaner. Her depiction of Felix’s family has an Evelyn Waugh-like curdled elegance, with the Cattons having only the faintest idea where Liverpool is and Felix honestly having a sister named Venetia (Alison Oliver). Felix’s mother (Rosamund Pike) frets to Oliver about her: “If only she found the right boy. Or girl. I don’t care. I was a lesbian for a while, you know, but it was all just too wet for me in the end. Men are lovely and dry.” Later on, when the news trickles in that a sad, weird family hanger-on (Carey Mulligan) has been found dead, Mum says, “Some people will do anything for attention.” The atmosphere at Saltburn is so credibly stuffy and patrician that it’s a genuine shock when we find them watching Superbad<; on DVD.
Through it all lurks Keoghan’s Oliver, who carries himself like an incel even though he has all the sex in the movie. Actually, not quite — he spies Felix masturbating in the bathtub and then lovingly slurps the bathwater after Felix vacates the bathroom. It would be easy to conclude that Oliver wants Felix (indeed, Elordi does look very desirable throughout this), but it’s more complicated than that. Keoghan strikes the right unsettling note as Oliver plays the Catton family members against one another and climbs into bed with their gay American friend (Archie Madekwe) in order to plant evidence of a crime on him. His long game almost shatters when Felix travels to Oliver’s hometown and learns the sordid truth about his past. One of the conceptual flaws here is that Oliver’s lie about his family is so easily discovered. Even so, Keoghan generates such a disturbing sense of presence with this role that you might be tempted to jump in the shower after seeing this.
Saltburn would be more interesting if it had a hint that Oliver’s devious quest costs him something, the way Ripley kills the man he sort of loves or the Kim family is crippled trying to replace the Parks. However, Fennell remains an uncompromising and quite skilled hand behind the camera, and the movie’s final shot of Oliver exuberantly dancing naked through the halls of Saltburn (to the strains of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor”) is a bravura way to end things. Despite its shortcomings, Saltburn is transfixing both in its direction and its acting.
Saltburn
Starring Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi. Written and directed by Emerald Fennell. Rated R.
