Director: Emerald Fennell

Stars: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe

British writer-director Emerald Fennell's follow-up to her bold debut ‘Promising Young Woman’ is a good-looking, but derivative and modish class satire meets erotic psychological thriller.

Keoghan is Oliver Quick, a working class Merseyside English Literature student struggling to fit in in the upper class environs of Oxford University. A way in presents itself when he comes across the charismatic aristocrat Felix Catton (Elordi) sitting under a tree with a punctured bicycle. Oliver offers to lend Felix his bike so he can make his lecture in time.

Later a grateful Felix admits the cash-strapped Oliver into his upper class circle. Felix’s friends don’t particularly seem to like Oliver, particularly Felix’s cousin Farleigh (Madekwe) who Oliver shares a tutor with, but they go along with it anyway.

When Oliver tells Felix he is estranged from his troubled family, Felix insists he joins him at his family’s country pile for the summer. There Oliver meets Felix’s beautiful, scatty mother Elspeth (Pike), tweedy eccentric dad Sir James (Grant) and Felix’s brittle sister Venetia (Oliver). Over the course of the summer, Oliver sets about working his way into their affections.

The early to midway scenes in which Oliver acclimatises himself to the ways of the toffs are tartly amusing, if broad, while Linus ‘La Land’ Sandgren’s sun-dappled photography imbues the stately Saltburn interiors with a faded grandeur, and the characters’ summer ramblings and lusty assignations with a deceptively edenic quality.

The picture goes wildly off the rails in the third act however when Fennell goes all out on the lurid psychosexual drama, and the tonal clashes and silly plot revelations begin to pile up. A moment of twisted eroticism near the end is just as likely to inspire laughter as it is gasps.

As amusing as they are, there is more than a whiff of déjà vu about Grant and Pike’s performances. Still, Australian actor Elordi impresses as the magnetic but petulant posho, while Keoghan is typically committed, even if his character is ultimately an unconvincing combo of anxious parvenu and something more wily.

Saltburn will be released on 17th November

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm