Saltburn dir by Emerald Fennell

Jan 21, 2024

I appreciate Emerald Fennell’s boldness in her recent release Saltburn, which Amazon Prime members can now view for free. This boldness in her directorial vision is a quality remarked upon also by her production designer for the film, Suzie Davies, in an interview with Denton-Record Chronicle film journalist Preston Barta. The film’s daring is a part of what captures viewers from its inception, but this daring comes at a price as the action of the plot often veers into a flimsy recklessness which gradually winds its way into a chaos spiral that it never quite escapes from, until possibly the coda, but even then the unusual sequence of dramas in the plot feels unsatisfied in the resolution.
In his review of Saltburn for The New York Times, Wesley Morris offers a hypothesis to my observation that the series of events seem reckless, and he suggests that it is because Fennell “is more drawn to – or maybe just better at – styling and stunts than she is the tougher work of emotional trenchancy.” I extract this sample from his piece as I find it to be the strongest observation in his acrid reaction to the film. I agree with Morris that the style of the storytelling has some unfilled holes that do not quite pass for a psychological thrill and instead just feel like unintentional voids, but I did find great merit and beauty in the production design as well as other minor, but affecting, details like the font in the opening credits and the high-brow allusions sprinkled throughout, such as the theft of some Palissy plates.

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       The color palette was one element of the production design that stood out to me as exceptional. Suzie Davies talked about color in the film with Preston Barta. When asked how “strategic she got with her collaborators on choosing colors for scenes,” she explained that her and the team had “absolutely planned for them”. Suzie said that a lot of the references used were from Caravaggio and other very traditional artists, mainly because (in the filmic story) the Saltburn family has lived at the estate for over 1,000 years. (I’ve included a link below to a recent Harper’s Bazaar article that offers an introductory gaze at the astounding 127-room English country house that provides much of the film’s setting.)
       Red is a color that frequently fills out the screen, and despite the references to Caravaggio, it was used in a quite contemporary way, according to Davies. There was a specific shade of red used in a lunch scene of the film following the melodramatic death of one of the main protagonists, an orange red, that compelled the scene to call attention to itself in a way that it would not have had a more typical Caravaggio-like blood red been used. The scene, which I consider the best in the film, and which serves as the film’s climax, becomes far more striking as a result of this interesting choice of color, and too an emblem of how careful decisions with mise en scene can dramatically improve an already potent scene.
       I couldn’t help but notice that the film a “black comedy psychological thriller” – a cocktail of genres that appears to be becoming far more popular in recent years in both mainstream and independent cinema alike, and not surprisingly so – had a looming aspect of the most recent black comedy film I reviewed for this column, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, the potential influence being the hallmarks of the camerawork used in his films, such as the low-angle shooting that avoids eye-level with the characters.
       In a recent interview, Saltburn cinematographer Linus Sandgren spoke about the style of camerawork he was directed to use by Fennell saying that she wanted the film experience to feel like one was “peeking into a dollhouse” and that she wanted the film to feel voyeuristic. Fennell also added, as a piece of ancillary advice in her instructions to help Sandgren contextualize them, “This film is kind of like a vampire film.” Sandgren explained that these instructions caused the old 20s German Expressionist silent movies to surface in his imagination, films which made heavy use of visual metaphors. As a general definition, German Expressionism in cinema is characterized by its dramatic camera angles, looming shadows, optical illusions, claustrophobic cinematography, and shocking twist endings, all features that we observe in Saltburn.
       The film’s style is far superior to its content. After the twist ending, we discover what the impetus of the seemingly disjointed series of catastrophes is (including taboo sexual relationships, grand larceny, and murder), but the weight of the suspense they generate over the course of the film merely drops off a cliff after the reveal; the Hitchcockian plot twist is disappointing and lackluster, and forces the audience to wonder if the two hours of film they just viewed was almost a waste of time - with the exception of the strong production design and style - because it lacks depth. The material is also shockingly explicit, and not just in one or two scenes, but really, I would say in about three. To give you a sense of the degree of vulgarity I am referencing, this series of X-rated subject matter is comprised of one of the main characters, Oliver, hooking up with his friend’s sister while she is menstruating (As Fennell said this was a “vampire film” and this moment is without a doubt intentionally vampiric), a long shot of this same Oliver gulping water out of a bathtub drain after Felix has masturbated in it, and, the most disturbing of all, a long shot of Oliver masturbating on Felix’s grave after he has died. As this is a thriller and a black comedy, the over-the-top darkly humorous horror is defensible, but I personally found the viewing far too offensive to be effective.
       The film starts getting really funny about a quarter of the way through when Oliver and Felix arrive at Felix’s family estate, the titular Saltburn. The dialogue in these scenes between the characters, rotting in the spoils of luxury and moral decay, are well-written and punchy and continuously entertaining. The dark humor is highly successful here and not as much in the implied dark comedy of the melodramatic tableaus in the explicit scenes.
       The repeated close-up shots of sweaty skin and hairs on end reminded me of the haptic visuality deployed in the work of some prominent Spanish female filmmakers, which I wrote about in a graduate paper. The simplest explanation of haptic visuality in film is an approach to filmmaking that enables the viewer to approach the film as if it were skin, and there are parallels to this technique in Fennell’s film. This technique compels viewers to have a newfound tactile and sensory relationship with the medium, as it does in Saltburn.

Star Rating: 6 out 10

Additional Links to Explore:

1. “Saltburn” Interview – Suzie Davies (Production Designer)