Saltburn: God is a serial killer

All the spoilers here! Don't read if you care about that sort of thing

I watched Saltburn, and quite liked it. There was a lot of lovely style in there: all of the actors really looked their parts (Barry Keoghan looks extraordinary as the lead), and the riffing on the class system was funny. It was quite a lightweight riff on Brideshead Revisited, but the main idea it throws at Brideshead is actually quite deep. God, it suggests, is a serial killer.

In Saltburn, the Charles Ryder character is Ollie, and Ollie is shagging and murdering the beautiful aristos one by one, until he ends up taking the house. In many ways, this is very similar to what happens in Brideshead. Charles Ryder does form weird relationships with too many of the Flytes, and they die off. Ryder is not killing them himself - they are murdered by a vengeful god, who is probably angry with them for being too catholic or not catholic enough or something. But by the end of the book/TV show, the Flyte family has collapsed almost as thoroughly as the family Ollie wipes out in Saltburn. By explicitly making Ollie a killer, it Emerald Fennell seems to be raising the idea that the death of the Flyte family was premeditated. And if not by Ryder, then who? It can only be god, the only other major character in Brideshead. I like that idea.

The other thing I enjoyed about Saltburn was the quick exposition of class divides at Oxford using essentially the tropes of American high school cliques. There’s literally a scene where Ollie is not allowed to sit with the cool kids in the cafeteria (Oxford college dining hall). And he’s bumped past by an aristo in exactly the way high school jocks bump past high school nerds. All of which is fine, and made me think about whether American high school cliques might not be a secret reflection of the British class system. Did American writers looking for conflict secretly look to their British counterparts and recreate feudal industrial England? (This is fanciful - I think American school clique tropes actually have different origins, like West Side Story, but it’s fun to muse on the parallels.)

Anyway, that was what I thought about Saltburn. A movie interesting enough to watch to the end and generate two different ideas in my mind. That puts it in the top 10%, easily.