Sing along with the common people.

Saltburn – 3.5/5

With Saltburn, I think I get Emerald Fennell's whole thing. She makes movies that almost feel like "hey, all right, this fits in with my communist sensibilities" until she 180s it. It feels like a stab in the back. "Were you not comrade?" In Promising Young Woman, it's oh cool, a woman getting revenge on shitty men, until it's oh god, is this the logical result of that train of thought?, does shitty men include every variable of shittiness?, I'm not sure I can follow the rails all the way to its end. And here, in Saltburn, it's oh cool, the rich eat you up, and then oh god. We want it to be this tale about the rich sucking. about how you can't be friends with someone who controls the faucet, who determines if you get access to water or electricity. Instead we get a story about how the lower classes don't want to eat the rich: they want to become them. She's not wrong. We eat them. They eat us. And on and on, the snake eating its own tail. We'll glady take the scraps from their table, trickle down economics, but bitter about it as though we, with their money, would pretend to do something different with it. She's not wrong—it's just that her movies feel like they could be more satisfying to the current cultural climate, only she'd rather upend it. She makes movies that make you mad because they're not what you want them to be. We want the perfect victim, or the perfect enemy, and she—correctly, but disappointedly—says hey, not so fast. But between the lines, between the sensationalist images thrown around to grab attention, I can't tell—honestly—whether she does it on purpose. She's deceptive. She's contrarian. We keep looking for a leftist in a centrist's body of work.