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Pop your trunks on, Barry, and run some Dettol round that bathtub. The much-vaunted Saltburn surge has not come to pass. Emerald Fennell’s movie has come up empty-handed from the Oscars nominations.
And, to be honest: good. Good. This is good. Saltburn is nice to look at. Rosamund Pike is a lot of fun. It’s always a pleasure to see Richard E Grant going full glower. I’ve no feelings about its five Bafta nods. But zero is exactly the right number of Oscars it should be up for.
It’s baggy, and flashy, and throws absolutely everything it can think of at you to keep you distracted, and the ending is very silly. It’s way too obviously desperate to make you clutch your pearls, and it’s a bit smug, but I don’t hate it. We’ve already been round the houses on how, as talented a filmmaker as Fennell is, it sticks in the craw that the director of a film about a weird middle class gnome-boy clomping his way into a class he doesn’t belong in had her 18th birthday party documented by Tatler. That’s fair, I think.
What’s slightly less fair is a slightly snide undercurrent of all the Saltburn-bashing on social media, in which people point to the fact that Saltburn clips have been seen four billion times on TikTok as evidence that a lot of the heat around the movie is from Zoomers glimpsing snatches of it on there rather than the whole thing.
People are talking about a movie! It’s fun when that happens! That a movie as deliberately gross as Saltburn can become one of the most talked-about films of the last five years isn’t really a bad thing. Some people have come to it cracking their knuckles ready for some Serious Discourse. Others have come to it on the same level as Sandra Bullock’s Bird Box, except instead of doing a challenge where they blindfold themselves they’re seeing what happens when their mum sees Barry Keoghan shagging a grave.
It’s all good. But after a rush of Oscars hype in the last few weeks Saltburn faded badly, and Fennell inadvertently hit on the reason why.
“I think it really tunes into this emotional need we have that is quite unfulfilled – the really operatic, heightened emotion; a heightened sense of the erotic and of love and of hate,” Fennell told the BBC. I think it might even be dumber than that. Saltburn is simply too horny for its own good.
It’s a daft, pulpy thriller powered by the fact that Jacob Elordi is so hot that characters simply cannot handle it. See those three scenes that Saltburn will always be known for: the bit where Barry Keoghan drinks the bathwater; the bit where Barry Keoghan desecrates the dirt; and the bit where Barry Keoghan dances around to ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ naked.
That is what Saltburn has been squashed down into. The chat about whether Saltburn actually made any interesting points about class and privilege (it didn’t), and whether building twist on twist made any sense (it didn’t), was quickly drowned out by the disgust-horn those scenes generated. That horn – and the three scenes which summed it up – made it feel like Saltburn had a bigger audience and more of a wave than it really did.
And anyway, Saltburn always felt like a film which yearned for a cult vibe which an Oscar nomination would have totally ruined. Is there really ever such a thing as an accident, Elspeth?
