The psychedelic genre has consistently been one of the hardest genres to operate
within for filmmakers. There are greats in the genre such as “Get Out” and “Shutter Island,”
and then there are disasters. “Saltburn,” released on Nov.17, crashed, burned, and solidified itself, in my eyes, as one of the worst films in the entire genre and one of the worst films released this year. The film follows the story of Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a scholarship student at Oxford University. Quick is portrayed as a socially awkward young adult with his only friends being the intelligent but nerdy students at the school. Quick then develops an unlikely friendship with an extremely popular and sociable student at the school named Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi).
Quick slowly becomes romantically obsessed with Catton in an abnormal, perverse, and almost psychotic way. Catton, being from a rich family full of upper-class elites, invites Quick to his family home, called Saltburn, for the summer. The rest of the film takes place in the Saltburn estate and follows the psychotic tendencies of Oliver Quick, revealing him to be a disturbed psychopath who will do anything for love, attachment, and money.
With its bright colors and vividly detailed sets, the film was visually stunning. The sets added a sense of grandeur to the film and helped it portray the truly elite nature of the upper class. However, the director made the artistic decision to film the movie in box format, meaning that the movie did not take up the whole screen and instead looked like an old black-and-white TV show. The filming format was off-putting and irritating and would have looked similar on my own TV, making the theater’s screen useless. This fact overtook any positivity regarding the presentation, making it visually unappealing overall.
However, the worst part of the film was the actual content of the story. The first act of the film was horrifically slow and didn’t seem to move the plot anywhere. Although the movie did pick up in the second half, the film still lacked any semblance of direction or purpose and was disorganized all the way through.
The film was also extremely choppy and lacked proper transitions between scenes, making the flow hard to follow and the overall film extremely confusing. After the credits rolled, I found myself unable to understand the plot of the film as the motives of all the characters were extremely unclear and underdeveloped.
Worse than the plot, however, were the explicit scenes. These scenes were vile and disturbing, causing the film to become close to unwatchable. In the psychedelic film genre, it is often the goal of the director
to make audiences somewhat uncomfortable. However, in this case, due to the depravity of Quick’s actions, the scenes were unhinged and almost traumatizing to the point where it became impossible to
keep watching.
The only bright spot of the entire film was the performances. The cast put on nuanced and eerie performances that helped set a creepy and vile tone to the movie. Specifically, Barry Keoghan gave such a stellar performance, I was finding it difficult to separate him from the character.
This film, due to its star-studded cast and popularity among film festival critics, was highly anticipated by many. After watching the film, it’s safe to say that “Saltburn” completely missed the mark, giving me relief when it finally ended.