Saltburn - Down The Drainhole
Thoughts On: Saltburn (2023)
An Oxford student makes new friends.
Though I found Saltburn thoroughly entertaining and adequately engaging, it is quite visibly a somewhat empty film. With touches of extreme cinema (of the French variety; a la Raw, for example), Saltburn is a meandering and plotless The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Barry Keoghan then essentially revives his character from Lanthimos' tragicomic narrative, classically structured in terms of the Greek tragedy, placing him in an alternative narrative in which he is more an object and less a symbol of destruction. Saltburn is essentially the same film as The Killing of a Sacred Deer; the characters never demonstrate a consciousness of their story, however. Where the plot unfolds against the will and actions of its characters in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, what we get with Saltburn is an unravelling of toxic obsession and manipulation in which the plot is the construction of just one character who controls everything. What Saltburn is missing is a crucial element of struggle and intensity in its drama. Our main character, though twisted and very capable of producing the most cringe-inducing nonsense acts of shamelessness, gets all he wants, losing out only on the sensation of love - which we are left questioning his capacity for as a clear psychopath anyway. There is no satisfactory struggle toward a human aspiration felt in Saltburn as a result of this. The narrative surmises no interesting debate or point. The Killing of a Sacred Deer pushes its characters to absurd choices in being a movie about the corruption of a family by an invading outsider, and as a result reveals scintillatingly human complications about them. Saltburn is humorous, and the extreme cinema set-pieces of vile passion are top tier (the sucking on the drain pipe being undeniably iconic), but the narrative in general produces little of substantial intrigue beyond an 'eat the indulgent and stupid rich' sentiment.
