A spoiler-filled breakdown of Jacob Elordi & Barry Keoghan’s darkly funny thriller.
*** PROCEED WITH CAUTION: Major spoilers ahead for Saltburn. ***
At long last, Saltburn is here.
Filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning Promising Young Woman, it tells the story of an Oxford University scholarship student named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) who finds himself drawn into the wold of his charming, much, much wealthier classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), spending an eventful summer with his eccentric family at their massive estate, the eponymous Saltburn.
As if that intriguing logline and those hot young stars weren’t enough, the darkly comedic drama immediately shot to the top of our must-see lists this year when we heard it described as “similar in tone” to The Talented Mr. Ripley, the (excellent!) 1999 psychological thriller about a sexually ambiguous con man.
That comparison also had us wondering if there was something more to Saltburn‘s central friendship of Oliver and Felix—like Ripley, would there be heavy homoerotic subtext between them? Might one (or both) characters actually be gay?
