Promising Young Woman was easily one of my favorite films of 2020. It used the structure of a rape-revenge genre movie to tell a hard-hitting drama and pitch-black comedy. Writer/director Emerald Fennell was nominated for Best Director and won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, so I wasn’t alone in singing her praises (my critics group declared it the top film of 2020, huzzah). It was, in short, pastiche elevated into something jarring and relevant and daring. With her follow-up Saltburn, she has taken the British class drama of an outsider trying to fake their way in the world of the rich and powerful, a Vanity Fair or Brideshead Revisited if you will, and attached a whole lot of salacious campy nonsense. If Promising Young Woman was elevating a trashy genre movie with vision and daring, then Saltburn is taking the soapy costume drama and degrading it with cheap shock, and “degrade” is quite the appropriate term.

Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a young Oxford student who doesn’t quite fit in with his peers. He doesn’t come from money and instead from a broken home, but he’s set his sights on success, and that includes winning over the handsome Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). He’s popular and athletic and from a rich family, and Felix takes a liking to Oliver, even defending him against his posh peers. Oliver is infatuated with Felix and convinced that he’s in love. After a personal tragedy, Felix invites Oliver to summer at Saltburn, his family’s enormous private estate in the country. Oliver amuses Felix’s parents (Richard E. Grant, Rosamund Pike) and sister (Alison Oliver) and settles into the black-tie dinners and racchous parties. He might not ever want to leave, and he might not be able to leave, and he might not ever want to be able to leave.

Saltburn is like if The Talented Mr. Ripley was made by the auteur of tawdry trash Larry Clark (Kids, Bully). It’s trashy nouveau camp that works as a sour class comedy until it becomes too sour and most definitely doesn’t work as any sort of engaging character piece or legitimate thriller. I don’t really know what Fernell was going for here and it doesn’t feel like she does either. I think back on the similar tale of Mr. Ripley as an advantageous upstart who got a taste of the good life and didn’t want to give it up. Like Saltburn, we know about our lead’s duplicitous and untrustworthy nature early, but with that movie we could see why others could be charmed by Tom Ripley, and we understood why he would want to stay in this privileged life. With Saltburn, when the rich are treated as shallow twits practically bored with one another from their opulence, the question remains what exactly is the appeal beyond simply attaining more? Also, the appeal of watching con artists slip into a world not their own includes seeing how they will get away with everything, how they’ll cleverly avoid all the traps that materialize. With Saltburn, there is no thrill of clever escapes because the insidious force is obvious and the other characters are too stupid to recognize because they’re meant to be satirical send-ups. It’s a would-be thriller that has gutted all its thrills by eliminating a foreboding sense of consequences.

However, the movie cannot work because all of the surprises were alleviated through poor character development of Oliver and in the performance of Keoghan. I don’t think anyone who ever watches this movie will be even the slightest surprised that Oliver isn’t quite the noble and honest young coed that he may have appeared to be. Except after maybe a couple of early scenes of nerdy awkwardness, Oliver has been depicted as an obvious predator. From the beginning, as he’s sharing his sad family back-story, I was already shaking my head in skepticism and predicting that the truth would be something ordinary and boring that he would choose to cover-up. It’s just too obvious where this scheming, covetous character is going, and Fennell doesn’t do anything to counter this overwhelming and, again, transparent assessment. If you have a character acting all weird and shifty and literally slurping up spent bathwater belonging to the target of his obsession, you shouldn’t then make the later machinations a big reveal. I wanted to laugh that Fennell thought the audience would need flashbacks to better clarify Oliver’s scheming nature behind a series of tragic events. I always assumed it was him because who else would it be? It’s an obsessive young man with oblique and yet obvious motivation to have what he desires from the privileged. We get it. The problem is that the movie never really better examines this desire from his outsider status. We already know he’s the malignant force.

Keoghan is a great actor but “naif” is not a comfortable role for the man. By his casting alone, you’re already looking at Oliver with measured distance and scrutiny. He’s already got a leer that will set people ill at ease. The way the character is written only further confirms this judgment. If Tom Ripley was acting this outlandishly bizarre and creepy from the get-go then he would have been arrested immediately. It’s not even a lack of nuance that hurts Oliver. Not all villains and screen psychos require a full three dimensions, but the characterization is just so lazy and unexplored. He’s just a font of unchecked lust. At least in 2017’s Killing of a Sacred Deer, where Keoghan also played a malevolent young man tearing apart a family unit, his character was meant to have a mythic quality of inescapable retribution, like the Greek tragedy its title was in reference to. With Saltburn, he’s just a creepy perv, but he’s also a boring and redundant creepy perv by the ongoing refusal to provide other context. He’s less a character than a proverbial set of hands to prod characters and poke the viewer in the eye. He’s a recycled program of tedious provocation.

Given how masterfully Fennell utilized and subverted salacious elements in Promising Young Woman, I’m shocked there wasn’t much more than empty shock value. Whatever intended satirical value of this movie is glancing and fleeting. Did you know rich people can be, wait for this, superficial? Saltburn becomes a gross-out game of how far this daft creeper will go with his deadly obsessions, and on that front it all feels too annoyingly flimsy, constructed merely to be transgressive for its own provocative sake. Watching the lengths Oliver will go to prove his disturbing bonafides, it overwhelms the movie and simply becomes the movie’s purpose itself, a measurement between how far Fennell can repulse you before you reach a breaking point. It’s not merely that the characters are easy jokes, it’s that they’re bad jokes. I will say though that the ending shot is so joyously performed that I wish the rest of the movie had this kind of entertainment.

I do think there is an audience for Saltburn, the kind of people who celebrate Harmony Korine’s art-trash movies (Gummo, Spring Breakers), the kind of people who love candy-colored stylistic excess and tongue-in-cheek provocations, and people that seek out twisted love stories and dark romances. Satburn styles itself as a romance, at least early, but it’s clear that there’s nothing romantic about watching a predator set his sights on his prey and work through the family. Sadly, there’s also nothing truly entertaining here either, other than wondering when the next extreme yet desperate attempt at shock value would appear. The characters are too thin and unexplored to support this movie, and the antagonist is too obvious, as are his machinations, though his motivation remains cloudy and also undeveloped. This movie would be akin to watching a bad flu work its way through a family for all the personality Oliver offers. Fennell is a talented storyteller and exceptional at spinning genre pastiche into something so much more, so it’s quite disappointing that Saltburn is so much less than even the sum of its sundry parts.

Nate’s Grade: C