★★

Emerald Fennel’s sophomore feature is a more self-conscious indulgence than her first. The sense that we are trading in the early days of a future auteur remains but, second time around, the restraint of experience is missing. While Fennel’s penchant for a venomous turn of phrase is undiminished – Saltburn drips with the acid of her pen – the film hasn’t Promising Young Woman’s precision and focussed bite. It sprawls in languorous pacing, dives headfirst into pitfalls of its own making, and appears altogether too pleased with its, admittedly resplendent, cinematography to truly engage beyond thematic artifice.

An impatience in the film’s preamble forebodes these later issues. Fennel yearns so deeply for wealthy, doe-eyed Felix to hurry up and lead outcasted Oliver – along with his astute, beetle black eyes – to the film’s titular palace of bygone pleasures that too little time is devoted to establishing who these young – not quite convincingly – undergraduates actually are. Other than contemporary updates for Brideshead’s Charles and Sebastian, of course. Fennel makes no bones of the blatant narrative borrowings. ‘Sounds like an Evelyn Waugh novel,’ says Oliver, early in the film. ‘Waugh was obsessed with our house,’ coos Felix in reply. There’s much of Patricia Highsmith’s Talented Mr. Ripley here too and a flush of Northanger Abbey, although Fennel’s audience are Jane Austin’s Catherine Moreland. Looking for mysteries that aren’t there.

Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi play Oliver and Felix. Where Oliver shirks from discussions of his past, Felix wears every juicy detail on his designer sleeves. A 2006 setting gives the film’s fashion a certain nostalgic flair, with noughties alt pop bangers blitzing over Anthony Willis’ somewhat overblown score. Back home, Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike rule the Saltburn roost, playing Sir James and Lady Elspeth Catton respectively – Felix’s parents. The latter steals all of Fennel’s best lines here, delivering deliciously malicious barbs – ‘I have a complete and utter horror of ugliness’ – to anyone submissive enough to take them. Following the death of one character, off screen, Elspeth remarks: ‘she’ll do anything for attention’.

Pike isn’t the only one having a ball. Carey Mulligan relishes her all too brief appearance as Pamela – ‘poor dear’ a Saltburn houseguest without the nouse to recognise she’s long outstayed her welcome. And yet, it’s Fennel who checks out having had the most fun in the production. Her joy in directing the film pulsates through the rhythmic beats of Victoria Boydell’s editorial stitching. Fennel devours her cast, framing each member in close ups of extreme intimacy. Such is to heighten a presentation of a bird cage existence. When Felix invites Oliver to Saltburn, he does so with the benevolent generosity of an ornithologist rescuing a flightless wren into his upper class sanctuary. A world apart. One in which series three through six of Downton Abbey never happened. Oliver is, however, no ingenue. A vampiric cuckoo is to enter the nest.

There is, truth be told, something rather too placed about Fennel’s arrangement of each constituent part of the film. Her camera effects are too self-consciously artistic and the metaphors too forced, leaden even. On arriving to Saltburn for the first time, Oliver is placed in literal shadow at the bottom of the entrance stairs, with Paul Rhys’ butler sneering down from the light. It lacks nuance but at least it makes sense. So much here is symbolically incoherent. Fennel drenches her narrative with spurious eroticism, scratching away all of the unspoken tensions that so beguiled readers of Waugh and Highsmith. Characters act without clear motivation but haven’t nearly the required layers of intrigue for this to register as a desired effect.

As the camp main course of the film gives way to a grimly somber pudding, twists land predictably. Much here is delightfully elaborate but Fennel’s is a Boxing Day chocolate box. That’s to say, hollowed out and littered with perfunctory wrappings. As the film’s would-be ‘iconic’ finale lands, the presiding thought can only be to question for what it was all for.

T.S.