Emerald Fennell hits the nail on the head again. The actress (Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown 3 and 4) and screenwriter (showrunner of the second season of Killing Eve), in 2021 had brought her directorial debut, A Promising Woman, to the Oscars, winning the statuette for best screenplay. His second film, Saltburn, arrives on Prime Video on December 22 and is already nominated for Golden Globes for lead actor, Barry Keoghan, and supporting actress, Rosamund Pike. Like the acclaimed debut feature, Saltburn presents itself as a comedy and ends as a thriller, launching a ruthless critique of contemporary society at a rapid pace.
Shot and set with such refined care that at times it seems like an advertisement for a perfume or a historical epic à la Downton Abbey, the film opens on the sorrows of young Oliver (Keoghan), a lost and out-of-place freshman in Oxford. Not handsome, not rich, introverted and nerdy, the boy nevertheless manages to get into the good graces of Felix (Jacob Elordi), who is his exact opposite: gorgeous, self-assured, privileged, full of friends and girls. At the end of the year, Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer at the family mansion, where his noble, idle and "ugly" parents (Richard E. Grant and Pike) live, and there are his sister Venetia, who lives in her brother's shadow, and his cousin Farleigh, who is always worried about living up to it. The days pass between tennis matches, readings (Harry Potter) by the pool and dinners in tuxedos. Slowly, tension grows from the cracks in this sumptuous surface. Oliver identifies everyone's weaknesses and uses them for a cunning social climb.
Born in 1992 in Dublin and soon orphaned by a young drug addict, Keoghan was nominated for an Oscar in 2022 for Best Supporting Actor in The Spirits of the Island, but he had already convinced in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Sacrifice of the Sacred Deer (2017). "I love complex, perverse characters. You throw out your own problems, interpreting someone else's," he explains at the Saltburn presentation in Los Angeles.
"Oliver goes through a subtle and disruptive transformation. I identified five gradations in the character, each with a different gait, gaze, shoulder opening. It wasn't easy, because we didn't shoot in chronological order. But I had no problem shaking it off: I became a dad during filming; Real life claimed me at the end of each day."
His nemesis is played by Elordi, the well-known Nate Jacobs of Euphoria, who also played the role of Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla this year. "Felix is like watching the sun rise, he has that magnetism - says the Australian actor - It's great, but it's not good". "On the other hand, who's good at Saltburn?" the director asks.
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