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Having won an Oscar for her gritty first film about a revenge murder, Emerald Fennell’s second movie, out this week, reminds us that she doesn’t believe in happy endings. Saltburn is about a vengeful college student who aspires to an even wider death toll.
Why would this charismatic young British actress want to become cinema’s doyenne of dark?
It’s not that she’s adrift in indie obscurity. Saltburn is funded by Amazon MGM Studios with Warner Bros International distributing overseas. And her co-producer is Margot Robbie, the effervescent Barbie who made the world blink pink.
Fennell, like Greta Gerwig, who directed Barbie, is a mega talented actress who also managed to hit the mark as a filmmaker. Before Barbie, Gerwig created a touching mother-daughter drama Lady Bird and then adapted and directed Little Women which scored six Oscar nominations including for Best Picture.
By contrast, Fennell’s debut film, Promising Young Woman, presented itself as a conventional “date movie” until filmgoers discovered that its cunning heroine, played by Carey Mulligan, had more complex motivations (Fennell calls it her “vampire movie”).
The award circuit has always coveted dark intentions, and hence Fennell was all but buried in statuettes — five Oscar nominations plus BAFTA, Golden Globe, WGA and PGA honors and myriad festival salutes.
Now comes Saltburn whose protagonist is a seemingly benign Oxford student from a broken family who venerates an enormously wealthy if idiosyncratic upper-class British clan.
The rich Brits not only welcome him but all but adopt him, before awakening to his darker strategies (spoiler alert: this is a Fennell movie}.
Saltburn is steamy, sexy and diabolically obscure. Mulligan even intrudes briefly as a crazed, flame-haired boozer.
Is it intended as a ferocious send-up of British inherited wealth? American filmgoers may find the characters and their dialogue challenging, to the point where occasional subtitles may be welcome.
But Fennell, like Gerwig, has clearly made shrewd use of the career opportunities afforded her. She has moved stealthily from Oxford to the theater to the BBC, embellishing her skills from acting to showrunning, from spy thrillers to Anna Karenina — ultimately triumphing on the festival circuit. The success of Promising Young Woman earned a coveted Telluride slot for Saltburn.
Gerwig, meanwhile, honed her talents through the mumblecore subculture of improvised dialogue and handheld cameras. She co-wrote Greenburg with her writer-director mate Noah Baumbach.
Coincidentally, even as Gerwig was celebrating the sizzle of Barbie, Baumbach was surviving last year’s pricey disappointment White Noise, in which Gerwig co-starred.
Thus while most artists struggle with the wide swings of success and failure, both Fennell and Gerwig have seemingly created their own bastions of self-preservation — the doyennes of risk, both light and dark.
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