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One can’t help but be fascinated by the new film by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell. As her hotly awaited follow-up to Promising Young Woman, folks have been frothing to see Saltburn – which is out in select theatres now.

This time round, she’s bringing us a “wicked tale of privilege and desire” with Saltburn – about a student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) struggling to find his place at Oxford University, only to find himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites him to Saltburn, his eccentric family’s sprawling estate, for a summer never to be forgotten.

‘What could be better than a story about excess and obsession against the backdrop of the sun-drenched English countryside?’ GQ asked.

While Elordi is decidedly 2023’s big-screen golden boy (having played in Euphoria, The Kissing Booth trilogy and most recently, as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla), Keoghan is on his own hot streak in the wake of an Oscar nomination for Martin McDonagh’s Banshees of Inisherin. The two boys are joined by Rosamund Pike, Promising lead Carey Mulligan and Richard E. Grant.

Since being released in select theatres on November 17, the reviews seem to be mixed, with stars ranging from three to a full five across media platforms.

It feels like the languorous longing from Call Me By Your Name and the debaucherous distress of Euphoria have come together in Saltburn, but according to The New York Times it’s “too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement”. The review goes on:

“We’re dragged back to 2006, where two boys at Oxford — bookish Oliver (Barry Keoghan) and rakish Felix (Jacob Elordi) — forge one of those imbalanced, obsessive friendships that one of them mistakes for love and the other tolerates because he’s needier than he looks. It goes south or sideways or to outer space but also nowhere.”

The Guardian, giving the film a humble three stars, writes that the movie “boasts dazzling turns from Rosamund Pike and Carey Mulligan”, but reckons the script could have used another all-nighter in the library. Saltburn is “watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings”. Confusingly, it is supposed to be (mostly) set in 2006 but it behaves as if it’s 1932.

The Evening Standard wrote that Fennell’s latest is a “deliciously twisty tale of grotesque overprivileged”, awarding Saltburn four out of five stars.

“It would be easy to dismiss it as an all-too familiar affair for Fennell, who graduated Oxford in 2007 and rarely shies away from her affluent upbringing – but Saltburn is so delicious in its twists, the gorgeously lensed disasters and endless farces, that it’s impossible to ignore the work of a truly gifted and haywire filmmaker.”

The Telegraph review is the most shining of them all, awarding Saltburn a full five stars and calling the “anarchic class satire” the “shot in the arm British cinema needs”.

Saltburn is stowed with terrific performances, the review notes, but the secret ingredient is its “sheer, nude-bungee-jumping-level fearlessness”:

“British cinema hasn’t been this badly behaved since the days of Nic Roeg and Ken Russell, and was frankly in need of the shake-up. Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement.”

Saltburn should be in local theatres by November 23, so you can check it out and decide for yourself.

[sources:gq&standard&guardian&newyorktimes&telegraph]