Saltburn Review: Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan Burn It All Down
There are movies you watch once and there are movies you think about for months. Saltburn is emphatically the second kind.
Saltburn Review: Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan Burn It All Down
Rating: 8.5/10
There are movies you watch once and there are movies you think about for months. Saltburn is emphatically the second kind.
The Setup
Oxford student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is clever, observant, and conspicuously out of place among his privileged classmates. When he befriends the golden, charismatic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), Felix eventually invites Oliver to spend the summer at his family's vast, gorgeous estate — Saltburn.
What follows is a psychological thriller, a class satire, a Gothic estate novel compressed into film, and something that is genuinely difficult to categorize. Director Emerald Fennell describes it as a "fairy tale." That is accurate in ways that only become clear at the end.
What Makes It Work
Fennell made Promising Young Woman (2020), which won her the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Saltburn is more formally ambitious — shot in a boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio that makes every frame feel like a painting, it positions the viewer as a voyeur throughout. The estate itself becomes a character: oppressively beautiful, full of rooms and rituals and family dynamics that Oliver studies with the focus of a student who has always learned through observation.
Barry Keoghan is extraordinary. Oliver Quick is one of the most unsettling screen presences in recent memory — a character who shows you exactly who he is and still manages to surprise you at the end. Keoghan plays him with a stillness that is more disturbing than any amount of obvious menace.
Jacob Elordi gives the performance of his career as Felix. The role requires him to be beautiful and kind and entirely unaware of either. Felix is not cruel — that is what makes everything that happens to him so complicated. Elordi makes you understand completely why Oliver is obsessed with him.
Rosamund Pike as Felix's razor-sharp mother and Richard E. Grant as his oblivious father round out a supporting cast with barely a weak moment. Pike in particular is operating at a level that suggests she enjoyed every second of this role.
The Ending
You already know this film has an ending that people talk about. Without spoiling anything: trust the film's logic. It earns every choice it makes — including the ones that will make you put your hands over your face.
The Verdict
Saltburn is not for everyone — it is cold, deliberate, and genuinely disturbing in places. But it is one of the most precisely crafted films of the 2020s, with two career-defining performances at its center and a screenplay that reveals its full architecture only in retrospect.
Streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
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