The college movie has historically been straight-coded. In North America, they tend to follow frat boys and their relationship with boobs and beer. In Britain, these films are, the odd exception (The Riot Club) aside, pretty but desperately uptight. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, the new movie from the maker of Promising Young Woman starring Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, feels different. Her campus movie dredges up something curious: the strange and obsessive byproducts of pent-up testosterone; of male brotherhood in extremity. Or, of what happens when straight male friendship gets so intense that the involved parties start acting a little gay, like that viral video of the topless guys in their back garden smashing garden chairs on each other’s backs.
In Saltburn, Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a working class boy studying at Oxford University on a scholarship. He is book smart but socially witless and struggles to make friends. From afar he watches Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the sun at the centre of the school’s social circle, who every girl wants to kiss and every boy wants to be friends with. He’s handsome, aristocratic and has an eyebrow piercing, and so Oliver, naturally, feels like his approval is important. One day, Oliver stumbles upon Felix lazing under a tree – his bike tyre has been punctured and he’s going to be scolded for not making it to class in time. To fix things and earn his approval, Oliver lends Felix his own bike. He’s a lifesaver, Felix says, cycling off and leaving Oliver to wheel the broken bike home. A cucked little brotherhood begins.
Of course, it’s not all so straightforward: Oliver isn’t actually attracted to men, but he really, really likes Felix, and wants nothing more than for the posh boy to take him, a poor working class kid, under his wing. After Oliver spills out details about his family trauma, Felix invites him to come and stay with his family to recoup, at their country manor – the titular Saltburn – for the summer.
There’s a surreal edge to Emerald Fennell’s posho world, perhaps because it’s a world she’s spent much of her real life in close proximity to. A place of ritual, where the rules are always abided by. The Catton family dress up for dinner each night, and routinely gather round a pokey plasma TV in a grandiose drawing room to watch shit films. In the long grasses of the garden, one can’t sunbathe unless they’re willing to strip naked to do so (even if, like Felix, you’re in the company of your cousin or sister). And so when Oliver arrives, he naturally becomes the most submissive character, keeping in line. His eyes widen; this world seems both bizarre and wonderful, and he will consume anything to feel like he can be closer to Felix. Even if that means slurping Felix’s used, cum-laced bathwater behind his back, after watching him masturbate through a crack in the door.
It feels like a unique, more complex kind of homoeroticism, more lethal and barefaced than the winking kind often tied to straight male friendships. IRL, these friendships act out performative ‘No homo, though’ homosexuality – the pet-naming, the overly affectionate touching, the jokes about “bumming” – that’s mostly absent here. Emerald has instead invented a reality in which platonic infatuation manifests as closely to homoeroticism as possible; where you can admire one of your guys so wholeheartedly that you’re one fist-bump away from wanting to fuck them.
You know those moments in movies, the ones in which you’re staring at the screen watching someone take a tentative step towards mayhem and chaos, and you’re thinking: ‘No. They’re not gonna go there’, and then they do? Saltburn has about six of those moments. Moments where you’ll turn to the person sitting next to you, shake your head and say: ‘Surely fucking not’. And then, yup. It happens. And you’re sat there watching the most unhinged stuff unfold, revelling in it like a dog discovering fox shit for the first time, feeling dirty and perverted by association.
It’s in these moments that Emerald stretches the boundaries of straight male friendship, and the lengths they go to maintain it, into something so egregiously homo you have to respect it. Sure, Saltburn might not be screaming in subtext – it’s an immaculate vibes movie – but it seems so hellbent on taking some big gay swings in service of its audience that it feels like a future cult classic. People complain that movies are too long and too boring nowadays. Here is a film that’s pure entertainment. A horny, gay ass movie about messy people. We would like some more of them please.