Saltburn

Saltburn was probably one of my most anticipated films for the final stretch of 2023. It's director Emerald Fennell's [unrelated] follow-up to the utterly fantastic - and #2 Best Film of 2021 - Promising Young Woman. That film was a intoxicating example of nearly everything going right...a surgically precise film with equal parts style and substance. 

From the trailers, Saltburn looked like something that could echo Fennell's successful debut. Unfortunately, that's not the case, but even worse, it feels only a couple degrees away from being an outright bad film. Talk about a sophomore slump.

For starters, even at 2 hours and 7 minutes, Saltburn is too long for what it needs to be. It felt like very nearly 3 hours and it meanders repetitively for a solid 45 minutes after a beginning that similarly feels like a slog. I'll give it credit that it continuously feels like it's building to something, but in the end it's not all that interesting. And that's perhaps my biggest rub with it. As the saying goes, "That's a long way to go for a short drink of water" and Saltburn suffers from that immensely. It's a bit of a shallow, vapid story and not even one I think needs to be told. More often than not, I take issue with stories where every character sucks. Ones where there's no likeable person to root for or no protagonist with at least some redeeming qualities. Saltburn feels a little like that and between an ending that I saw coming from a mile away, loose ends it never ties up, and just generally not being that captivating, this is a massive step down and one of the year's bigger disappointments given how powerful Promising Young Woman was. 

Saltburn, and Fennell for that matter, does redeem itself somewhat thanks to performances and filmmaking acumen. Specifically, Barry Keoghan does expert work, toeing the line between many complicated gray areas. The visuals, editing, and cinematography all show that Fennell is indeed talented in the director chair, perhaps more than she is in the writer's chair. 

Perhaps my disappointment is exaggerating my lack of excitement for what the film brings to the table, it's true. Even trying to give it the benefit of the doubt however, Saltburn just feels hollow. It's dark humor only has a handful of moments, the "shock value" you've heard so much about is really overblown, and outside of Keoghan's performance, there's nothing here that will sear into my brain the way her debut feature did. 

Rapid Rath's Review Score | 5/10