So, this is on Amazon plus now.
Anyone else seen it?
I will leave my overall review to not the top post.
Boy this film sure is something.
So, to start, my “letterboxd” one sentence review.
3/5
I absolutely loved how this movie looked and sounded. Emerald Fennel the director is effing fantastic, and Linus Sandgren (cinematography) is a genius. Also, the cast is stacked in this, really great.
Now, Emerald Fennel the story writer… 0/2 at bat right now.
I also loved promising young woman despite the ending, and I kind of feel the same way about this. She really loves to turn all of her movies into a Twilight Zone episode with a twist at the end. There was some story about classism or something buried in here, but the movie was more interested in being shocking than telling us that story.
God damn was this movie gorgeous though. (And I am not just talking about Jacob Elordi)
I haven’t seen it, but heard a lot of discussion of it on podcasts (including Tom and Kelly’s top tens). Seems to me there’s an obvious reference point for this movie that I haven’t heard anyone identifying and that’s Brideshead Revisited–a novel, but also a once-pretty-famous tv miniseries starring a baby Jeremy Irons. The basic premise of the story sounds identical to the first third of so of Brideshead, and even the emotional thrust of it the same, even if Keoghan’s character goes a bit… further.
I loved Barry Keoghan’s performance. The rest? …not so much.
From the trailer onwards I was very strongly suspecting this was going to be a Talented Mr Ripley type story and so it was. I liked a lot of it but a) it kinda pales in comparison to Ripley and b) Fennell just doesn’t trust her audience enough or have a deft enough hand with the screenplay to avoid some fairly thudding exposition in the late movie. Still, that ending dance sequence was a banger.
I thought the performances through the film were great too, particularly Keoghan and Elordi. Rosamund Pike was also just spectacular and funny as the gossipy Mom.
I read a review that said they would drink the bathwater of only she would do more comedies.
But was there really a twist at the end? I thought it was obvious from about halfway in what was happening and that the filmmaker intended for us to know.
At least that was my reading of the film and the reason I found it ultimately unsatisfying—we were told what was happening and it happened. That, for me, made it less interesting to watch.
Loved the first hour, though.
Sure, but then why go through the whole him explaining everything to the audience at the end?
It felt like we weren’t supposed to figure it out by the end? At least it was structured that way.
I agree. It seemed at the end that it was structured to be a big reveal, but it felt to me as if everything had been revealed earlier (after they went to Oliver’s parent’s house, so all the explanation at the end fell flat for me.
I just wanted to post Paul Schrader’s review of Saltburn on facebook.
“SALTBURN flips the Talented Mr Ripley formula in which the lower class arriviste undermines the establishment with his charm and beauty,” he wrote. “In Saltburn the lower class boy is plain and the object he pursues is beauty personified. It’s an inversion which should not work. And it doesn’t.”
Made me chuckle.
At first I thought this was a movie about Salt Bae and I was horrified.
Either me or Paul Schrader is completely misremembering The Talented Mr. Ripley. My memory: Ripley is a plain(ish) striver pursuing the beauty personified of Jude Law, and undermines the establishment with his psychopathic commitment to lying, talent for mimicry and willingness to murder people.
Guys, stop talking about Talented Mr. Ripley or I’ll have to go and watch it again!
Finally got around to watching this, and hoo boy. It wasn’t boring. Overall I liked it. It’s visually gorgeous and sometimes surprising. I think the director doesn’t really know when to end a scene and the whole thing could have been about 15 minutes shorter if he did know. And Rosamund Pike positively steals the movie.