Saltburn (2023)

"I was a lesbian for awhile you know, but it was all a bit too wet for me in the end."

I must begin with praising Rosamund Pike as Elspeth. who's delivery of the above line and several others really made me laugh. In my opinion, she's the best part of this movie. Saltburn is about a young man Oliver (Keoghan) who forms a bond with a fellow student at college Felix (Elordi). Believing Oliver has nowhere else to go for summer break, Felix invites him to stay at his family's mansion in Saltburn.  This is the first act of the film and it's a rather slow and boring build, and it immediately gets better in the second act. Starting with the tour of the mansion and the introduction of the Catton's. Believing this to be a thriller (which it's not), I expected Felix his family to devour Oliver with their weird rich people antics.  The Catton's are too likeable. Watching "Superbad" and "The Ring" together in a small lounge area inside a vast estate. Family dinners, drinks by the pool, running naked through the fields. I kept waiting for the flip to switch and the weird shit to go down... and it does. Just not in the direction I expected. It turns out to be Oliver who is preying on the Catton's. While I think this is less predictable than my expectation, the way it develops doesn't make much sense. Oliver does some crazy shit that is the most talked about moments of this film but they do not carry much significance other than grossing out the audience. In fact, Oliver is never a likeable character. So his transition from being an unlikeable loser to an unlikeable sociopath didn't exactly make me feel any real emotions. In the end I felt bad for the Catton's, but I don't think Emerald Fennell wrote this script for rich white sympathy. However, I did enjoy this film. It only dragged out in the very end. Visually it's a treat and the many stars bringing their talent to the screen was great to eat up. Where the story lacked in the substance the camera made up for with style and it's very much worth a watch.

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