The mixed response to Emerald Fennell’s 00s-set thriller evinces a movie-going conundrum: how do we assess entertainment that is predominantly indexed on vibes?

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/movies/t/664183

The mixed response to Emerald Fennell’s 00s-set thriller evinces a movie-going conundrum: how do we assess entertainment that is predominantly indexed on vibes? By now, the buzz around Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s sweaty, lascivious sophomore feature about a middle-class interloper in a vacuously rich family, has begun to settle into two camps. On one side, viewers and the plurality of critics who find the film, which had one of the most successful limited releases this year in the US before expanding nationwide last weekend, to be a flashy, self-satisfied mess of empty provocations. And on the other, those who see Fennell’s remix of Brideshead Revisited and the The Talented Mr Ripley with a dash of mid-aughts Abercrombie & Fitch as a successfully absorbing erotic thriller with titillating shocks. Depraved, but in a fun way, to summarize the predominant sentiment on TikTok.

Everyone agrees that Saltburn, for the most part, looks good – lush, attractive, expensive. (It helps that it stars the Euphoria actor and ascendant screen heartthrob Jacob Elordi.) But are its squirm-inducing visuals – a character slurping another’s cummy bathwater, a literally cocky ending – the mark of perverse genius, or cheap, hollow tricks masquerading as it?..

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    On one side, viewers and the plurality of critics who find the film, which had one of the most successful limited releases this year in the US before expanding nationwide last weekend, to be a flashy, self-satisfied mess of empty provocations.

    And on the other, those who see Fennell’s remix of Brideshead Revisited and the The Talented Mr Ripley with a dash of mid-aughts Abercrombie & Fitch as a successfully absorbing erotic thriller with titillating shocks.

    The Saltburn divide is, in my view, less a product of the film’s intention as satire than its artifices – its visual provocations, its luxe tableaus of aristocratic wealth and debauchery, its bold and underlined telegraphing of desire.

    Numerous festival circuit films this year – Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, Steve McQueen’s Occupied City – use feelings, mood, visual language and sensory experience to communicate a sliver of the unspoken human experience; together, as the New York Times’ Beatrice Loayza wrote, they argue against the tyranny of story in how we evaluate screen-based media.

    It revels in its gargantuan manor house, ludicrous plot twists and aristocratic daffiness via the reliable scene-stealers Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant, as the Catton parents.

    Some get halfway there (spoilers ahead) – Oliver’s bathwater moment, or eating out Venetia on her period, are self-satisfied provocations for an increasingly puritanical moviegoing public, but those scenes at least try to literalize Ollie’s consumption of the Cattons’ wealth as something carnal.

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