REVIEW: Saltburn by Emerald Fennell

Private school Oxbridge in decline

Saltburn is a strange but oddly arresting film. Writer-director Emerald Fennell is relatively new to screenwriting. Her previous (and first) film, Promising Young Woman (2020), tells the hackneyed tale of a woman’s violent campaign of revenge against a white upper-middle class male classmate who sexually assaulted her years prior. The villain’s unsanctioned predations in university have derailed the protagonist’s life trajectory, leaving her a sad careerless woman in her thirties at the start of the film. Over the course of the film, she hunts down her abuser’s friends, before publicly identifying him as a rapist on his wedding night.

While Saltburn’s narrative rests on a similarly implausible plot, it has no overt political agenda. Indeed, it is a strangely apolitical film. It falls into that distinctly English genre of stories that portray predatory social climbing by wily working-class interlopers at the expense of unsuspecting toffs.

As a period piece set in noughties Oxford, it is primarily interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it is valuable for its representation of Oxford twenty years ago — prior to the forced demographic transformation of its student body over the last ten years. And secondly, it is valuable for its vivid depiction of the hedonistic and ferally sexual culture that previously existed at Oxford, at least amongst its privately-educated undergraduates. Saltburn’s central storyline, while genuinely animating, is more interesting in that its depictions of intra-English social relations feel increasingly dated in what is now a racially and religiously fractious Britain, in which accusations of privilege primarily cut across colour rather than class lines.

---

In 2006, Oliver (Barry Keogan), a vaguely lower middle-class Scouser, matriculates at Oxford, and quickly finds himself socially isolated in an environment culturally dominated by former public school boys. At his first formal hall, which is filled with chain-smoking blonds, he is forced to sit next to an acutely autistic — and similarly lower-middle class — maths prodigy. Oliver is highly conscientious: he is berated by his bonhomie tutor in his first tutorial for actually doing the summer reading, and soon finds out that while he is churning out essays, most of his peers are ‘skiving’. They spend most of their time having sex and doing cocaine while managing to bragger their way through Oxford by sheer force of public school charm.

Over time, the effete and bisexual Oliver becomes enamoured with the handsome and popular Felix (Jacob Elordi). Felix — southern, aristocratic, beautiful, and the progeny of a long line of Oxonians — is the deliberate antithesis to the weird-looking and awkward Oliver. Felix dates a string of navel-baring low-cropped-jeans-wearing privately-educated ‘stacies’ while spending the rest of his evenings at the pub (or at whatever Plush was called two decades ago before it became a gay bar filled with fat people and leering subcontinentals).

The two inhabit entirely different social ecosystems until a punctured tyre on Felix’s bicycle leaves him stranded on the way to a tutorial (one of the few he bothered attending that term). Seemingly by happenstance, Oliver is riding in the vicinity, and offers him his bicycle in an act of conspicuous generosity: it is starting to rain, and Oliver is laden with books. This triggers the gradual inveigling of Oliver into Felix’s social circle, as the latter takes Oliver under his wing when he encounters him again in the pub. Felix is much taken with the ostensible authenticity of Oliver’s ‘working-class’ origins; Oliver regales him with stories of his supposedly drug-addicted parents. Then, one day before examinations start, Oliver tells Felix that his father has died. This triggers Felix inviting Oliver to Saltburn — the titular estate of Felix’s family — for the summer.

The film takes a Brideshead Revisited-cum-Parasite turn during its second half. Upon arriving at Saltburn, Oliver is warmly welcomed by Felix’s graceful family. While they are highly generous, he is still made to feel out of place by the family butler and by Felix’s mixed-race (and also Oxford-attending) male cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), the product of Felix’s runaway aunt — not an entirely implausible story if you look at the case of Constance Martin.

Oliver — socially conspicuous and decidedly weird, just as he has been throughout the film up to this point — somehow manages to seduce Felix’s nymphomaniac and bulimic sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), before then also seducing Oliver’s aforementioned mixed-race cousin. He turns Felix’s family against the latter by framing him as a thief — the only subplot which has any racial aspect to it in the entire film. Oliver also charms Felix’s mother (Rosamund Pike) by playing into and reinforcing her own suspicions of the various extended family members who are at the estate.

The film’s climax is the revelation that Oliver’s family are not, in fact, drug-addicted Merseysiders, but are rather a relatively normal suburban family from Prescot. His father is alive and well. Oliver is no longer the exotic inverse of Felix’s own family, but is simply a swot from a rather mundane background.

He is also a pathological liar. Felix privately tells Oliver that he will be expelled from Saltburn shortly, but that he will not inform his family of Oliver’s lies. But on the night prior to Oliver’s intended date of departure, Felix dies of an apparent overdose during a party. After Felix’s funeral, his sister kills herself out of sorrow. Oliver — who Felix’s mother has become emotionally attached to as the last person to be with her son — is eventually paid to leave by Felix’s father.

In the final scenes of the film, which are set in the present day, Oliver renews his contact with Felix’s mother after her husband’s death. It is revealed that he had carefully orchestrated all of the many apparent ‘accidents’ of the film: slashing Felix’s tires so that they would come into contact in the first place; deliberately lacing Felix’s drink so he would die of an ‘overdose’; placing razors next to Felix’s suicidal sister’s bath; and, finally — the coup de grâce — poisoning Felix’s now invalid mother. Oliver becomes the sole inheritor of Saltburn, and in the final scene is shown dancing naked through Saltburn to the sound of ‘Murder on the Dance Floor’.

---

The plot itself isn’t particularly novel. The narrative of a canny working or lower-middle class upstart gradually infiltrating an unassuming and dysfunctional aristocratic environment isn’t a new one. Indeed, the film it most reminded me of was The Servant (1963), in which a similarly predatory homosexual northerner manages to take control of his aristocratic employer’s life. Nor can it really be a meaningful critique of social injustice and the economic divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ — and moreover, in spite of how some critics will undoubtedly interpret the film, I don’t think it is really intended to be.

The main plot twist of the film is the revelation that Oliver is not actually from a deprived background, but rather from a loving suburban home which he has chosen to ignore. Oliver isn’t gauche because of a disruptive childhood upbringing, but rather because he is a socially anxious and manipulative sociopath who uses the class guilt of his peers to advance his own interests. In a radical contrast to a film like Parasite (2019), the class interloper isn’t presented in remotely favourable terms; in this sense, the film seems to espouse an oddly reactionary defence of perceived aristocratic values. Felix and his family are, after all, beautiful, kind, and generous. While initially Felix and his friends could be construed as somewhat shallow, he exudes an upper class comfort in all situations and a genuine friendliness to people of all backgrounds.

Oliver, by contrast, is odd-looking and self-loathing: Barry Keogan has one of those unusual Celtic phenotypes which appears to be almost Asiatic. He is sexually obsessed with Felix and his family, exhibiting a paraphilic and vampiric obsession with their bodily fluids. He is constantly on the outside of the family looking for ways to get in. The symbolism of the film is overt throughout, with Oliver always shown lurking in the shadows, adjacent to spider webs, and constantly playing a macabre mechanical marionette set in the house. He is also frequently compared both to a spider and a moth by the other characters.

In this sense, Oliver is a genuine parasite: not someone who enters an upper-class family out of the exigencies of poverty, but rather because of a remorseless, avaricious sociopathy. He turns the family inside out before ultimately destroying them one by one in order to inhabit — and then desecrate — an empty estate. His hatred is purely pathological class animus.

---

Perhaps Fennell, informed by her own experiences as a privately-educated (Marlborough) girl who attended Oxford (Greyfriars) in the early noughties, really is making a macabre social commentary on the genuine anxiety that state school students would have felt when entering what was then still an environment dominated by the public schools. Oliver lies to his family about his involvement in activities that are seen as conventionally Oxford and thought to be ‘posh’, such as rowing and the Oxford Union. Yet even in this sense Saltburn feels oddly dated — even Oxbridge rowing is hardly entirely dominated by the upper-middle and upper classes nowadays — but perhaps the film was never really intended to be ‘relevant’.

This is because the world it depicts — which is also depicted in films like The Riot Club (2014) — is entirely predicated upon an Oxbridge that is dominated, at least socially, by public school boys. This is a world that no longer really exists. It is at best a marginalised subculture, engaged in increasingly guiltily (and often at the risk of official sanction) by semi-underground groups that are small and declining in numbers. This is primarily due to an admissions process which is now giving way to full-blown (and yet still mostly hidden and unofficial) affirmative action; the lack of A Level exams during the pandemic greatly accelerated this process, though this was already happening well before then. As many readers of the Pimlico Journal will have read, the proportion of privately-educated students at Oxbridge has fallen precipitously (and seemingly inexplicably) over the last decade. Saltburn’s Oxbridge is one where roughly half of its students attended private schools; today, the figure is less than a third, and falling.

In this sense, the film is an elegiac paean to an old Oxford which was more posh, more beautiful, and more fun. Everyone is good-looking and athletic; the girls are all blonde; and the culture is decidedly more hedonistic. Of course, much of this is an intentionally self-depreciating parody that makes use of already well-known cultural tropes, and the film makes frequent allusions to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited — and at one point, Felix even claims that many of the characters in the book are based on his family. But still, the arresting styling of the film — with its mock gothic credits, cinematic shots of Oxford’s spired landscape, and Zadok soundtrack — all further contribute to the feeling that this is a semi-guilty, yet nostalgic reverie to a disappearing world.

There is a noughties YouTube channel called ‘Spotted at Cindies’ which might be of interest to readers. Filmed outside of the ‘Cindies’ nightclub in Cambridge, so-called ‘student journalists’ would interview random student club-goers. The students interviewed are much more attractive and posh than the current student body, and are more openly hedonistic and sexually voracious. They are also conspicuously less politically correct: at one point, students parody an Asian female interviewer by affecting Chinese accents, which she takes in her stride — something which is impossible to imagine happening today. The culture seems to have been more organic and less sanitised. Similarly, the culture shown in Saltburn — simply by dint of being apolitical and fun — feels a million miles away from the current-year therapeutic milieu which prevails at today’s Oxbridge, in which the incidence of binge drinking, sex, and drug-taking have fallen dramatically. Indeed, Saltburn’s world feels much culturally closer to the current student bodies of Oxford Brookes or the Royal Agricultural University at Cirencester than it does to the Oxbridge of 2023.

More fundamentally, the social preoccupations of the film — state versus private, northern versus southern — are dichotomies which operate almost entirely in an intra-ethnic context — there are only two non-white characters in the entire film — and thus feel out of place in contemporary Britain. While political discourse will remain outdated for years to come, as an ageing commentariat clings to the cliched certainties of class, the social concerns of the early noughties are increasingly distant from the reality of Britain today. Chavs, for instance — a distinctly white antisocial subculture — have largely assimilated into the MLE-drill cultural borg. The neuroses of incoming ‘out of place’ freshers are now far more likely to be racial than social. The presidents of both the Oxford and Cambridge Unions are non-white. And your average Tab controversy will soon be more likely to involve a foundation year hijabi from ‘Inner London’ shouting at some JSoc member that ‘Hitler was right about the Jews’ over Palestine than a privately-educated Conservative association member drunkenly singing racist songs and hoisting the Rhodesian flag.

I don’t expect readers of the Pimlico Journal to be particularly sympathetic to the main themes of Saltburn. In many respects, its depictions of lower-middle class nefariousness — in which an individual who (classically) would have been identified as a grammar school boy is shown to be a sociopathic social climber — are deeply unappealing to defenders of meritocracy. Oliver conceals his real upbringing in favour of a fake ‘working class’ one because the upwardly-mobile lower-middle classes garner none of the benefits of real ‘privilege’, nor any patronage from the elite, often being held in contempt by both those socially above and beneath them — in effect, they can be attacked from both above and below.

But it’s still interesting in that it points to the way in which Oxbridge, and, more broadly, Russell Group universities, have changed in a largely negative direction. The decline of ‘posh’ Oxbridge is not a result of the collapse of class privilege in the wake of a grammar school revolution, but rather because of the profound malaise that is affirmative action. And while hereditary privilege has no real defenders, affirmative action is backed by a hegemonic anti-British racial ideology. It has come at the expense of many able young people, whose families often reluctantly chose private education as the only (very expensive) alternative to a frequently highly dysfunctional comprehensive system — something that is, in part, a direct consequence of mass migration. It is also a system that will become increasingly aware of the need for explicit ideological compliance, one of the many ways in which current-day Ukania is growing to resemble the late DDR.

The film also points to the increasingly gelded nature of youth culture; or rather, the ‘youth culture’ which is foisted by a Young Pioneer vanguard onto young people. While many ‘trads’ will celebrate the decline of drugs, promiscuity, and drinking, it betokens an anti-sexual and life-negating tendency which should be disconcerting for all right-minded people. Indeed, the proliferation of various paraphilic identities is more of a retreat from of an active sexuality than an expression of genuinely hedonistic ‘degeneracy’.

Overall, then, it is better to think of Saltburn as a time-capsule for a bygone Oxford (and Britain), rather than supposing that it offers any kind of incisive social commentary on the state of the ‘class system’ today. And Fennell’s time-capsule — whether intentionally or not — is ultimately one that reveals the many ways in which higher education — and British society as a whole — have changed, almost entirely for the worse.

---

This article was written by an anonymous Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?