Barry Keoghan in Emerald Fennell's Revenge Thriller

Early in Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning debut Promising Young Woman, a seemingly working-class Oxford scholarship student who has cracked the inner circle of the college’s filthy rich, ridiculously handsome and ineffably cool party boy, observes that the latter’s aristocratic family sound like characters out of Evelyn Waugh. But name-checking the author won’t be necessary for the countless viewers who have already spotted this as a Brideshead Revisited knockoff. And the writer-director doesn’t stop there; she also lifts liberally from The Talented Mr. Ripley, Teorema and maybe even a dash of Single White Female.

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Fennell is adept at pastiche, and at least she goes for sources worth plundering. But this is a movie that’s all surface cleverness, with nothing terribly insightful to say about its rarefied milieu and those gazing in longingly from the outside.

Saltburn

The Bottom Line A stylish but ultimately silly patchwork of borrowed ideas.

Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Release date: Friday, Nov. 24
Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan
Director-screenwriter: Emerald Fennell
Rated R,2 hours 7 minutes

Even so, Saltburn is juicy stuff, a revenge thriller that’s often wickedly funny and wildly enjoyable. That’s especially so whenever Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant are wafting around the spectacular English country estate that gives the film its title and the visuals their heaping helping of sumptuous real estate porn. The movie is at its best when Pike and Grant are spouting witticisms and drolly tone-deaf reaffirmations of their characters’ obscene privilege.

As the glamorously vaporous Elspeth Catton, Pike has a priceless way with some very choice dialogue, whether it’s a caustic throwaway (following a clingy friend’s suicide: “Anything for attention”) or a narcissistic spiel about her modeling days hobnobbing with Brit pop luminaries in London. I howled at her vociferous denial — while actually implying — that Pulp’s “Common People” was about her (“She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge? I never wanted to know anything!”). Pretty much every one of Elspeth’s lines is quotable.

Grant is equally sublime as her eccentric husband Sir James, the quintessential vaguely absent British toff, batting around inane observations and plummy superlatives while seeming to float above everything from minor mishaps to major disasters. James hides a more brittle side, however, and is more willing than his wife to dispose of their charity cases once they have tired of them.

The trouble is, Elspeth and James are secondary characters, and the leads, as compelling and charismatic as they are, are stuck behind counterfeit figures familiar from too many movies to name, making their trajectories predictable. They’re more like “types” than people.

Barry Keoghan, who excels at playing guileless innocence as a mask to hide a darker, more calculating mind (see The Killing of a Sacred Deer), stars as Tom Ripley, I mean Oliver Quick, a humble Merseyside lad with horror stories about escaping from his parents, with their drug-dealing, addictions and mental health issues. When he first gets to Oxford in the class of 2006, uber-nerd math genius Michael Gavey (Ewan Mitchell) takes Oliver under his wing, recognizing a kindred brainiac with zero social skills and no chance of an entrée into any other clique.

But Barry has other ideas, ditching Michael as soon as he can ingratiate himself with aristocratic golden boy Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a lanky beauty with floppy hair, piercings and tattoos, who merely has to nod in the direction of female students at parties to have them traipse off into his bed.

While Felix’s initial loyalty is cemented when he’s stranded and Ollie offers him his bike to get to a tutorial, his other friends turn up their noses at the academically gifted scholarship student with the style-deprived thrift-store wardrobe. None of them is more disdainful than sharp-tongued Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), Felix’s sexually fluid, half-American cousin, who has become a fixture at Saltburn, frequently with his hand out for cash to send to his struggling mother in New York.

Ollie is hardly discreet about the intensity with which he studies Felix, and he soon wears out his welcome. But the rich kid evidently has a habit of bringing home strays, and when Ollie reveals that his father has died in undignified circumstances, and that he can’t bring himself to go back there, Felix impulsively invites him to spend the summer at the family estate.

While imperious Saltburn butler Duncan (Paul Rhys) can spot an interloper a mile off and gives Oliver a frosty greeting, Felix shows him around the palatial digs as if it’s any old shack, indicating points of interest with absolutely no interest — “Accidentally fingered my cousin on the stairs here,” “Ghost of Granny,” “Fucking awful Rubens.” Elordi is a hoot, playing him as a louche millennial Rupert Everett. Felix seems so in his element in these opulent surroundings that Ollie’s awestruck stupor barely registers.

One of the funniest scenes is when Oliver comes downstairs from his room to meet the family and overhears a conversation in which they exoticize his poverty and coo over the tragedies he has supposedly endured, like he’s some refugee they’ve taken in. “Darling, where’s Liverpool? It’s on the sea, isn’t it?” asks Elspeth. “North,” replies someone, without much certainty. Elspeth hilariously overcompensates to make their guest feel welcome, plying him with questions and noting his beautiful eyes with relief: “Oliver, I have a complete and utter horror of people being ugly!”

The other guests include Fairleigh; Felix’s bulimic sister Venetia (Allison Oliver), described by Elspeth as “sexually incontinent”; and “Poor Dear Pamela,” a bohemian oddball recovering from an affair with a ghastly Russian in rehab, played by Fennell’s Promising Young Woman star Carey Mulligan in an amusing extended cameo. The writer-director clearly knows these posh types well, though her affection for their foibles leaves room for a hint of condescension toward the climbers once Ollie’s class envy becomes apparent.

As the younger residents loll around naked in a field reading Harry Potter books, stretch out by the pond guzzling champagne or play tennis in their formal dinner wear, Oliver starts imagining that kind of idle high life for himself. Seduced by Felix’s magnetic aura, he begins his own seduction campaign, finding cunning ways to exert power first over Venetia, then Farleigh, both of whom inform Ollie that he’s just another one of Felix’s toys.

Ollie’s flattery clearly pleases Elspeth, though she’s too caught up prattling on about herself to give it much attention: “I was a lesbian for a while you know… But in the end, it was just too wet for me. Men are so lovely and dry.” I swear, I kept wishing I was watching Pike in The Elspeth Chronicles.

Where Fennell’s script shows its weakness is in nailing exactly what’s driving Ollie. It seems more of an outrageous flourish than a sign of genuine erotic fixation when he slurps up Felix’s bath water after his host has been masturbating in the tub. In fact, Ollie’s sexuality remains ambiguous throughout, more opportunistic than omnivorous. Even the class divide keeping him on the fringe of the Cattons’ world becomes irrelevant as he’s gradually revealed to be — spoiler alert! — just a plain old violent sociopath. Anyone looking for evidence of what bred this behavior in Oliver won’t find it here in a film that gradually gets lost between satire and lurid psychodrama.

The honeymoon with Felix ends abruptly when he decides to surprise Ollie with a road trip for his birthday and discovers that the damaged creature he has adopted isn’t quite what he seems. Oliver’s subsequent course of action becomes increasingly ruthless, beginning at that old standby of movies about hedonistic rich people — the lavish costume party, this time with thumping EDM. Fennell is no believer in restraint, so rather than making Ollie someone who has tasted the good life and is desperate to hang onto it, the writer-director turns him into a nutjob with a laser-focused sense of purpose.

While the push over the top in the concluding scenes should be a sinister thrill ride, it actually bumps the movie off the rails into ridiculousness, souring the enjoyment. Don’t even ask what Ollie does to a freshly filled grave. The decision late in the action to spell out every step of Oliver’s plan just strips the character of ambiguity. It’s too bad, really, because Keoghan’s performance has the potential to explore more interesting ideas about covetousness, desire, aspirational hunger and greed, about the haves and the have-nots.

Critics were divided over how effectively Promising Young Woman dug into its themes, but there was no doubt it was actually about something. Harder to say the same for the showy but somewhat empty Saltburn.

While there are worse things to watch than Keoghan cavorting around naked to “Murder on the Dancefloor” — a song choice that could hardly be more on the nose — it’s a sure sign that subtlety and subtext are of limited interest. Saltburn is fun in a cheeky way that draws attention to its provocations. But there’s not much there there.

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