Critics reviews

There are occasional perverse pleasures – Rosamund Pike, as Felix’s mother Elspeth, is gloriously rude; Archie Madekwe, as poor relation Farleigh, is a malicious delight – but there is little satisfaction to be found in the picture’s messily uninhibited climax.

“Saltburn” succeeds in slashing our expectations about how people are supposed to behave in polite society. This is her particular spin on an oft-told tale. She holds up a magnifying glass to a rarefied world and exposes the truth of human nature: its transactional tendencies, its queasy mix of desire and disposability.

In the end, Saltburn doesn’t have a lot to add to the conversation Fennell keeps wanting to have about the power of white men in this world. It’s a surface-level critique of the upper class and a style-over-substance poke at the out-of-touch aristocrats and the bitter have-nots.

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn is a wickedly subversive, exquisitely twisty character study that leaves no room for redemption and satisfying resolutions, and that’s the real genius of it.

Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of Pasolini; it’s supposed to be (mostly) set in 2006, but behaves as if it’s 1932.

Fennell isn’t just here to have a good time. She’s here to rip Britain’s ruling class to shreds. And she does so with justifiable precision. None of Fennell’s ambitions would succeed without a quartet of performances that are in tune with the tone she’s trying to establish.

Fennell is in that kind of blow-it-all-up mode, and the result is a spikily entertaining, narratively rackety ride led by a formidable Barry Keoghan in devil-may-care mode.

Fennell’s immaculately crafted follow-up to “Promising Young Woman” might have a lot more fun pushing your buttons if it had any clue how to get under your skin. It’s exciting when someone makes a movie bursting with raw talent and half-cocked ideas — much less so when they make two of them in a row

Had it arrived four years earlier, amid the spate of class-conscious thrillers like “Parasite,” “Knives Out” and “Joker,” Fennell’s version of an eat-the-rich satire might have seemed at least thematically au courant. But emerging in 2023... her evisceration of upper-class cluelessness barely lands.

“Saltburn” works as a distinct and wildly entertaining probe into familiar waters of privilege, rather than the definite word on it, one that reinforces Fennell as a distinguished auteur of the big and the bold even on shaky grounds.