Jacob Elordi Brings Serious Heat in This Years Most Edgy Movie!

Director Emerald Fennells highly anticipated follow-up, Saltburn, which opens this week, is a massive middle finger to everyone who praised her as a Promising Young Woman in 2020 if her breakout first film was the most furious creative marker of the #MeToo era.

Director Emerald Fennell’s highly anticipated follow-up, Saltburn, which opens this week, is a massive middle finger to everyone who praised her as a Promising Young Woman in 2020 if her breakout first film was the most furious creative marker of the #MeToo era.

Her cinematography is not for the timid, and Sandeep Reddy Vanga would do well to study Saltburn, maybe the most controversial film of the year if he wasn’t so preoccupied with fuming over his success.

Representing the grotesquely rich as the least deranged is a profoundly subversive decision in this fantastically wicked dark comedy about class strife.

The movie sarcastically claims that only parasites would live in a civilization that is irreparably damaged.

Ultimately, though, how appetising can empty provocation be? It’s hard not to ask what the aim of it all is in a film that begs you to check it out, especially in that insane last act, is it to make you ooh and aah or actually to reflect on your life?

Jacob Elordi and Barry Keoghan in Saltburn

In his brief career, Barry Keoghan has become an expert at portraying sociopaths, and here he plays another one. He is Oliver Quick in Saltburn, a misfit from the middle class who finds it difficult to find his bearings as an Oxford scholarship student in his first year.

He is instantly in awe of the aristocratic Felix Catton, who is portrayed by the recently discovered hottie, Jacob Elordi, with a feline grace.

Felix is inherently charming and the life of the party at each gathering where he is invited; in short, he embodies everything that Oliver, who has the appearance of a moth, lacks.

However, after a few coincidental meetings, he starts to grow curious about Oliver, and soon after that, they become inseparable.

Felix immediately feels sympathy for Oliver when he confides in him one day about his mentally ill parents, who have battled drug addiction all of his life.

Felix asks Oliver to spend the summer at Saltburn, their expansive rural estate. Oliver finds the ostentation and marvel of it all, and Felix appears to be as interested in his family as theirs.

Felix’s parents, played by Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant, give performances that purposefully give the impression that they don’t belong in the same film.

If Pike’s Elspeth had never really returned to the bewildered Ben Affleck and instead taken up a new identity, she may have been Amy from Gone Girl in an alternate scenario. She calls Oliver “a complete and utter horror of ugliness” in their first encounter, and without missing a beat, she refers to her squatter friend Pamela (Carey Mulligan in a vibrant cameo) as “the wettest of wet blankets.”

People like Oliver and Pamela are just objects to Elspeth. Toys and diversions that she will switch between as if they were yearly fashion trends.

Is Jacob Elordi the next superstar?

Saltburn doesn’t even stop to chuckle at the wealthy; forget about eating them. Of course, there are many opportunities for absurd humour to come from Oliver’s early days at the grand estate.

However, it becomes apparent rather quickly that he won’t exactly serve as our surrogate in this peculiar universe. Notwithstanding their usually disagreeable behaviour, the Catton family seems more relatable, if anything.

What does it matter whether they throw extravagant parties that would make Jay Gatsby feel inadequate or if they act with obvious contempt towards others? Oliver is consistently mysterious and never charming, largely due to his excellent casting choices or just his writing style. And it makes sense that this would make you feel strange.

In the second act, the film pulls the rug out from under your feet, preying on your basic kindness as it asks you to think of the poor village bumpkin. In many ways, Oliver is the decoy protagonist.

Felix is the true hero of the narrative—the sad hero. And what a year Elordi is having, balancing the calculated villainy of his Elvis Presley in the latest movie Priscilla with the innocent naïveté of this character. He’s being dubbed Hollywood’s Next Big Thing for a reason.

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Felix may have easily been transformed into a better awful man, but Elordi portrays him as something of a himbo.

Oliver, however, makes it clear that he has more evil intentions. Some viewers might feel compelled to perform a walk-out during the film’s candid and chaotic last third; one scene, in particular, may be the most inflammatory to be included in a mainstream release of the year.

Similar to her debut picture, Fennell’s political views demand thorough scrutiny because she verges on demonising the oppressed and having sympathy for the wealthy, but it has been encouraging to see her formal development.

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