Enfant terrible of film geriatrics, Paul Schrader- director of such diverse gems such as Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), First Reformed, (2017) The Card Counter (2021) and last years Master Gardener, not to mention American Gigolo (1980), Light Sleeper, (1992) and the screenplays for Martin Scorsese’s pantheonic classics Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980)- took to Facebook, as he infamously does, to post his thoughts on Emerald Fennell’s new discourse-y smash Saltburn:

Schrader is dead on here, but Saltburn, which follows oddball scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) in his quest to befriend the affluent Prince Charming Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) at Oxford, and his ensuing summer spent at the Catton family’s countryside mansion, itself named Saltburn, has more than one glaring issue: it lacks the coherence to bring any of its inch-deep ideas together; as the savage mystery-thriller romp, as the black-comedy-of-manners, or as any kind of insightful class-examination. As Schrader points out, you could watch Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) to see such a bloody, cerebral premise done well, but Saltburn also serves as an interesting corollary to Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History, where a group of mega-rich classics students find the poor intruder Richard Papen from gas-stations-and-drive-ins-ville interesting because he’s so ordinary, and that’s what makes the interplay between the two worlds sing. In Saltburn, Keoghan is an uninteresting black hole -seemingly by design- and you never get the sense he’s out of place; in fact he’s so sophisticated in his sociopathy that he almost seems to suit the high-life more than Elordi and co. do (a brief faux pas about eggs at breakfast does not sell the point).

What Fennell (who is an upper-class woman herself; celebrities and even royals wear the gemstones of her jeweller-father Theo Fennell; her 18th birthday was covered by Tatler) miscalculates is that no matter how caught up you are on the curriculum you will never be one. of. them. So the script abounds with contradictions- is Keoghan’s character meant to be an identifiable outsider or a metaphorical, scythe-waving reaper? The rest of the cast (Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike as Elordi’s parents, Alison Oliver and Archie Madekwe as his sister and cousin, respectively) fail to round out the tale with any nuance whatsoever; when it comes to the rich, Fennell mostly veers towards caricature; but even The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie (1972) gives you some interiority to the hopes and fears of the elite. But she’s not quite using any blank space effectively either, as in Pasolini’s Theorem (1968) where our intruder is a complete ghost- we don’t need to know who he is when the film centres the consequences and reactions of his actions on the lives of the elite’s he’s meddled with. Keoghan’s second-act middle-class-home-life reveal, meanwhile, has all the whoomph of an Agatha Christie victim landing in a hedge plant- but more importantly, derails what could have been an enjoyable ambiguity.

Saltburn tries to be one thing for as long as it can before getting flustered and becoming something else; it’s this lack of dynamics - of tensions- that makes Oliver’s who-could-see-it-coming-murder spree dramatically inept; like watching two opposite magnets slowly edge towards each other- this section is a synecdoche for the film as a whole; a total lack of chemistry.

And if the final thing is situated somewhere between Donna Tartt, Pasolini and Bunuel, it’s ultimately intimidated by it’s own, let’s say, lineage, eagerly assuring us of its confidence by elevating its voice to the loudest in the room (each mirror-reflection shot feels like an act of repetitive authorial insecurity - has anyone said “all that money and no style” yet?). Keoghan’s performance is so bad here it really shows how acutely skilled a director like Yorgos Lanthimos is in bringing a truly eerie- but precise- performance out of him in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and Lanthimos is fucking Greek.