SALTBURN TBC

Comedy of manors…

‘You have excellent hands for croquet, dear boy…’

SEE THIS IF YOU LIKED

THEOREM 1968 Houseguestfrom-hell Terence Stamp hots up Pasolini’s elegant tale of seductive family secrets.

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY 1999 Don’t get in the boat, Dickie! Matt Damon’s social climber stalks the Italian Riviera.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED 2008 A palatial estate and an aristo family ensnare an Oxford student in Julian Jarrold’s romantic remake.

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★★★★★ OUT 17 NOVEMBER CINEMAS

Writer-director Emerald Fennell’s hotly awaited follow-up to the Oscarwinning Promising Young Woman is another darkly comic revenge thriller, soaked in sex and devious doings.

It’s a fiercely funny watch, albeit one that doesn’t deliver on its promise quite as well as Fennell’s debut.

Taking aim this time at England’s ruling class rather than American misogyny, it’s a glossy, wildly OTT satire about a working-class student’s fatal attraction to an aristo family. The filmmaker loves a prickly outsider, here revelling from the off in the classof-2006 social ordeals of ignored and impoverished Oxford student Oliver (Barry Keoghan, deliciously awkward), who is determined to befriend the university’s golden boy, Felix (played with languid grace by Jacob Elordi).

DIRECTOR Emerald Fennell STARRING Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Alison Oliver, Richard E. Grant, Archie Madekwe SCREENPLAY Emerald Fennell DISTRIBUTOR Warner Bros. RUNNING TIME 127 mins

Horrified to hear that Oliver’s drug-dealer dad has died, Felix whisks him off to summer at his family’s vast stately home, Saltburn. Which is when things get a bit Brideshead Regurgitated. To Oliver’s delight, the boys bond by lounging naked around the lake and playing tennis in tuxedos. Squirming humiliations await him, though, delivered by Felix’s narcissistic mother Elspeth (Rosamund Pike, gloriously patronising) and vapid father James (a stiff-upper-lipped Richard E. Grant), a pair of poisonous posho caricatures who treat Oliver as a pitiable charity case.

If Saltburn’s knowing jabs at selfish high society feel pretty familiar after the ‘hate the rich’ movie cycle that’s already given us Parasite, Glass Onion and Triangle of Sadness, Pike’s preening and backbiting (a friend’s suicide is dismissed as ‘anything for attention’) provides sheer scene-stealing pleasure.

But Fennell is so caught up with this sly satire, and her camera so enjoyably fixated on Oliver’s hungry spying on Felix’s sex life (he even slurps up his post-wank bath water) that Saltburn’s lurid revenge plot and showy characters feel secondary to its desire to shock. Cramming the film with luridly sexy encounters (including a menstrualblood-smeared moonlight tryst) ensures that, eventually, the cumulative effect is more comic than erotic.

The key redeeming feature is Keoghan’s fine performance, sliding inscrutably from humiliation to heartless Mr Ripley-style manipulation and (literally) grave misdemeanours, as Oliver’s plans for Felix messily unravel. Only his naked yearning provides the film with some emotional heft, as its increasingly unhinged story spins jerkily from a dark, juicily transgressive tale to a lavish but ludicrous psychodrama.

THE VERDICT Fennell’s provocative thriller showcases the Talented Mr. Keoghan, but there’s disappointingly little substance underneath its shower of shocks.