After its massively successful streaming release last November, Emerald Fennell’s film Saltburn dominated cinematic discourse for months. A 2006-set period piece that starts as a 21st-century Brideshead Revisited and morphs into an ironic erotic thriller, its carefully honed aesthetic, plot twists, and off-kilter sexuality divided critics and audiences. Some lambasted the film for lacking subtlety; others admired its dark humor and transgressive sexuality. The “Saltburn discourse,” though, left out some of the film’s key features: Fennell embeds a complex set of influences, and conscious riffs on genre, that frequently went overlooked. Beyond simply acknowledging the works that inspired her, British “country house” films chief among them, Fennell uses her influences as raw material to create a counterintuitively topical class drama.Through Fennell’s manipulation of her influences, Saltburn ultimately speaks to an audience living amidst sky-high wealth inequality and primed to denigrate the rich, even as the filmmaker knows we can’t always resist the pull of wealth.
Saltburn’s protagonist is Oliver Quick, a socially isolated, middle-class Oxford undergraduate who endears himself to the alluring Felix Catton by feigning an impoverished background. Felix, taking pity on Oliver, invites him to spend the summer at his family estate, Saltburn. Oliver latches onto the house and the family, yet as his attachment to Saltburn grows, the Catton family’s interest in Oliver wanes, leading him to secure his place via manipulation, seduction, and violence.
The film’s array of aesthetic and narrative references reflects Fennell’s intent to subvert the tropes of the country house genre, in which social dramas among aristocrats play out in well-appointed estates, and critics picked up on the film’s clearest predecessors. Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and its 1981 miniseries adaptation were cited in practically every review I read: The premise and characters directly respond to Waugh’s tale of an Oxford student’s infatuation with a wealthy friend, his family, and their grand estate.
The premise and characters directly respond to Waugh’s tale of an Oxford student’s infatuation with a wealthy friend.
Waugh’s novel, set between the early 1920s and ending in the midst of World War II, gives an idealized view of the English aristocracy, tempered by melancholy at the jarring social changes that damaged their elevated status. Its attendant television adaptation, made nearly 40 years after the novel’s publication, placed the events of the story outside of living memory for many of its viewers, allowing even greater latitude for the romanticization of a bygone era.
Fennell set out to achieve the opposite effect: By setting the film less than 20 years before its release, she makes her audience look back on mid-aughts fashion and cringe. The aesthetics of the 2000s—“the least cool of all the periods,” according to Fennell—were uniformly garish, and the on-trend ugliness of the wealthy characters’ clothing undercuts their sense of superiority. Because the audience is not primed to idealize the period, it becomes easier to see Oliver’s desire for the Cattons’ lifestyle with a critical distance. They have no appealing or redeeming qualities beyond their wealth, and their taste in fashion and decoration are dominated by thoughtless conspicuous consumption. If Charles Ryder’s fixation on Brideshead and its inhabitants stems from a search for beauty, Oliver Quick’s appears to be a simple obsession with money and status.
Fennell also diverges from the stately genre in foregrounding exaggerated sexual drama and violent class envy. While sexual and class tensions are inherent to the genre, they are typically encased in an aesthetic of restraint and gauzy nostalgia. Fennell, though, intently bursts through the boundaries of taste that often relegate sexuality to subtext. Oliver’s desperation to transcend his class is so acute it manifests as sexual desire, and this guttural need forms the film’s narrative backbone and generates its most memorable scenes, which seesaw between the erotic and the ridiculous—Oliver slurping Felix’s semen from a bathtub drain, Oliver thrusting into the soil of a fresh grave, Oliver gleefully dancing nude through Saltburn’s cavernous rooms.
In an interview, Fennell laid out her aims in centering broad sexuality in a genre known for more refined pleasures: “[the viewer] is operating on the movie that it’s saying it is, which is a classic country house Merchant Ivory Gothic movie, and then the movie that it really is, which is just something about sex and desire and our very modern obsession with things … that will never love us back.” In other words, the film’s country house trappings are a mask for its actual subject matter of all-consuming class envy. She sets up a familiar bubble of idyllic nostalgia undergirded by generational wealth, then bursts it with the Cattons’ period-appropriate bad taste and Oliver’s desperate horniness for their privileged lives and elevated status. Oliver, in particular, illustrates the “modern obsession with things … that will never love us back” that Fennell notes is her subject matter: He craves the rarefied prestige that residence at Saltburn can confer, even as its residents have no regard for him, and Fennell implicitly suggests this desire is shared by those swept away by onscreen images of impossible wealth.
He craves the rarefied prestige that residence at Saltburn can confer.
Fennell invoked Brideshead Revisited and Merchant Ivory dramas only to undermine the romantic gloss they cast on wealth. Two other influences, which went comparatively unnoticed by critics and audiences, reveal even more about her aesthetic and narrative aims: Joseph Losey’s films The Servant and The Go-Between, deemed by Fennell in the same interview as “two of my favorite films of all time.”
Losey was a Hollywood director in the 1940s who decamped to England after being targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and subsequently developed a substantial body of work. The Servant (1963) and The Go-Between (1971) came from a years-long collaboration with screenwriter Harold Pinter, and presaged Saltburn in their thematic concerns: class upheaval, sexual desire and manipulation, and the moral vacuity of the English upper classes.
The Go-Between, adapted from the 1953 novel by L.P. Hartley,is a lodestar of the country house genre, yet it features a distinctively unsettling portrayal of how sex and the British class system clash. The film centers on a middle-class 12-year-old boy, Leo, who stays with an aristocratic school friend at his family’s estate in the summer of 1900. Out-of-place and eager to please, he unwittingly facilitates an affair between his friend’s older sister and a neighboring farmer by delivering letters between them. As the affair comes to light, Leo learns sex can have cataclysmic consequences, even as he has no practical understanding of the act.
Fennell described The Go-Between as a major influence on Saltburn in interviews, and noted her own attraction to the film:
It’s very human, in spite of its extreme beauty. And it’s that thing that Losey and Pinter did together so much, which is: there’s so much cruelty there.
While Fennell borrows numerous narrative and formal touches from Losey’s film, the most important quality of The Go-Between she evokes is the dichotomy between a beautiful place and an ugly situation. In fact, she amplifies it: While The Go-Between features an elegant setting and morally ambiguous characters, Saltburn showcases an ostentatiously grand setting and amoral, ignorant characters.
Fennell delights in parading this contrast. Take the scene where Felix gives Oliver a tour of the house. The camera follows Felix through each lavish room as a romantic strain of strings plays underneath, yet his descriptions of each room are crass and banal: In one room he “accidentally fingered [his] cousin,” another is plastered with portraits of “dead rellies.” Felix’s inanity is loudly announced, and set against plush, regal interiors as if to emphasize his unworthiness.
In keeping with the recent trend of “eat the rich” cinema, the luxurious Saltburn is a breeding ground for moral and intellectual dissipation. In The Go-Between,it takes time for Leo to realize he doesn’t morally approve of his hosts; in Saltburn, Oliver, though he keeps his cards close to his chest, immediately concludes the Cattons have no substance and don’t deserve the abundance in their possession. As she makes it increasingly clear that Oliver is determined to destroy each member of the family and claim Saltburn for himself, Fennell prods the audience to delight in their downfall by repeatedly highlighting their superficiality. The Go-Between invites its audience to question the repression and exploitation that the English aristocracy can perpetuate; Saltburn takes this as a given and uses this as a starting point for a thriller with the aristocracy as the targets.
Fennell prods the audience to delight in their downfall by repeatedly highlighting their superficiality.
This development in Oliver’s character arc leads straight to The Servant. While Oliver’s introduction to Saltburn as both a welcomed guest and an uncomfortable outsider echoes Leo in The Go-Between, the reveal that he is a ruthless social climber parallels the titular servant in Losey’s earlier film.
The Servant, based on Robin Maugham’s 1949 novella, depicts a rich, suggestible young man, Tony, who hires a live-in manservant, Barrett. Barrett takes advantage of Tony’s upper-crust ignorance and his childlike desire to be catered to, and proceeds to pamper him, flatter him, and alienate him from his fiancé, while covertly exercising a plan to take control of the house. By the film’s end, the master is completely dependent on the servant. In effect, The Servant is both the logical inverse of a country house film and a corollary to the genre. It is pointedly contemporary and anti-nostalgic, yet it also views a well-appointed house as the ultimate site of wealth, romantic and sexual discord, and class tension.
Oliver tears through the Catton family with the ruthlessness of several Barretts, manipulating and disposing of family members as necessary. He seduces Felix’s insecure sister Venetia and his skeptical hanger-on cousin Farleigh, and endears himself to Felix’s parents, James and Elspeth. Oliver hits a snag in his plan when Felix discovers he was raised comfortably middle-class, despite portraying himself as a poor child of addicts. Felix demands he leave the next day, so Oliver kills Felix at the party with a poisoned drink to prevent his exile. Felix’s father evicts Farleigh after Oliver suggests he brought cocaine to the party, and Venetia dies by suicide soon after (Oliver supplied a drunk Venetia with razor blades). Years later, James dies, and Elspeth invites Oliver to stay at Saltburn again. She quickly grows ill and alters her will to leave Saltburn to Oliver. At the film’s conclusion, he delivers a menacing monologue describing his master plan to an unconscious Elspeth, which he completes by ripping out her ventilator tube.
Like The Go-Between, Fennell takes inspiration from The Servant through significant escalation. Oliver’s manipulation of the Cattons echoes Barrett’s domination of Tony, and his sexual methods reflect Barrett’s implicitly eroticized tactics. Yet that Oliver kills three people and explains it in a sinister monologue shows how far Fennell took the character arc presented in The Servant: While Losey and Pinter exercise restraint, showing Barrett’s scheme through action and suggestion rather than explanation, Fennell spells out that Oliver is a socially striving psychopath who kills to get what he wants. The Servant ultimately leaves the audience to decide whether Barrett’s actions are morally justified, while Oliver’s characterization descends into comic villainy by the film’s end.
Fennell’s idiosyncratic synthesis of her influences ultimately reveals a pointed, cynical viewpoint. Her deployment of country house tropes is meant to foreground their social and sexual subtexts and to subvert the soft gaze they cast on wealth, and she takes inspiration from Losey’s films by escalating their ambiguous, unsettling explorations of sex and class into a thriller familiar to viewers of recent eat-the-rich films. But rather than allowing audiences to claim any sort of moral or political satisfaction, Fennell places them in a more compromised position: The metatextual argument that Saltburn poses is that contemporary audiences have much in common with Oliver.
The progression of Oliver from a sympathetic figure to a serial killer with a bottomless hunger for wealth and status helps to make Saltburn an effective piece of pulpy entertainment. It also suggests, in exaggerated form, a double-bind in current cultural ideas around class. Responding to extreme and unabating global wealth inequality, some of the most talked-about films of the past few years, notably The Menu, Knives Out, and Triangle of Sadness, depict working-class characters toppling the idle rich, and audience sympathies are primed to lie squarely with the resourceful proletariats. Yet the middle-class striver at the heart of Saltburn, despite the melodramatic excesses of his characterization, is indicative of a different strain of class tension: He envies his hosts even more than he resents them, and his ultimate ambition is to maintain the class system with himself at the top, rather than destroy it.
He envies his hosts even more than he resents them.
It’s telling that another of Fennell’s cited influences is Cruel Intentions (1999), the soapy, sexy update of Dangerous Liaisons that became a source of aesthetic inspiration for a generation of teenagers. Just as director Roger Kumble achieved in that film, Fennell creates a surface of enviable luxury and sustains it through the entire film, but Fennell also subverts this at every turn: the clothes are ugly, the wealthy characters are selfish and simple-minded, and Oliver’s desire to supplant them is both desperate and villainous. Yet scenes of lavish birthday parties and lazy afternoons spent sunbathing are enough to make viewers want to inhabit its world. From Fennell’s point of view, even when we know the moral void at the heart of wealth, like Oliver, we still want to dance through its gilded halls.
Class envy ultimately reaches its tendrils into every facet of Oliver’s psyche, directing each of his desires toward the need for social elevation—his sexual obsession with Felix, in particular, is a physical outgrowth of his craving for higher status. In his final monologue to Elspeth, Oliver repeats “I hated him. I loved him” about Felix, indicating the depths of both his resentment and his desire. This irresolvable tension is ultimately the core of Saltburn: The simultaneous anger and envy that wealth inequality generates means that many may both reject the wealthy on principle and doggedly dream themselves into their world.
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