By John Corrado

★★½ (out of 4)

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, the writer-director’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning debut Promising Young Woman, is an overly ambitious mixed bag of a film.

The film’s two stars, Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, are good in the leading roles as young men with palpable homoerotic tension between them, and there are some cool looking shots courtesy of cinematographer Linus Sandgren.

But the film overstays its welcome at 131 minutes, serving as an overlong and often frustratingly obvious “eat the rich” satire that isn’t as clever or shocking as it seems to think it is. This one is a pretty major step-down from Fennell’s debut, lacking a lot of what made Promising Young Woman feel more insightful and fresh.

Keoghan stars in the film as Oliver Quick, a socially awkward student starting out at Oxford University circa those halcyon days of 2006. Oliver is a “scholarship kid” from a poor background who is rejected by the rich, high society snobs like Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), whose popular cousin Felix Catton (Elordi) catches Oliver’s eye and becomes the point of his obsession.

When Oliver shares the news that his father has died, Felix takes some pity on him, and invites him to spend the summer with his family at Saltburn, their sprawling country estate. Felix’s family is made up of rich, eccentric aristocrats, including parents Sir James Catton (Richard E. Grant) and Lady Elspeth Catton (Rosamund Pike), and troubled sister Venetia (Alison Oliver). The supporting cast mostly plays this as camp, including Fennell’s Promising Young Woman star Carey Mulligan, who has a few scene-stealing moments as Elspeth’s disaffected friend Pamela.

Much of the film unfolds at this estate home, where the family hosts lavish parties and get caught in psychosexual games. It’s this psychological thriller aspect where the film is particularly lacking. The characters are mostly one-dimensional, and it’s not that interesting trying to figure out what’s making them tick. The film desperately wants to have a sense of danger, but never really feels like it’s taking itself seriously enough for the stakes to feel particularly high. Even the twisted sex scenes feel more like they are being played for lurid laughs.

Fennell’s screenplay borrows from Parasite and The Talented Mr. Ripley (and maybe even a little The Great Gatsby), but it’s regurgitated mostly through one-joke commentary on the rich elites being air-headed simpletons. The film’s most transgressive element is probably that Oliver, the member of the proletariat worming his way into their lives, isn’t a sympathetic figure trying to upend the class system, but rather a degenerate creep.

Keoghan fully commits himself to the role (including some prolonged, full-frontal nudity), and he’s a strong enough actor to keep us glued to watching him onscreen, even if his character can’t help but feel like a shell of the one he played in The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Elordi has a similarly magnetic screen presence, and the two of them bring an air of mysteriousness to their characters that goes beyond what was written for them. It’s an example of actors transcending the base material.

If the movie feels bloated and too on the nose, Fennell’s film does have some stylistic merit that glosses over this lack of substance and keeps it at least partially entertaining to watch. Though he is working within the confines of a square 1.33:1 aspect ratio that serves no real narrative purpose and lends an air of pretension to the film, Sandgren offers some striking shot compositions that highlight the often lavish production design. Like in Promising Young Woman, Fennell also provides a few solid needle drops.

But the film too often mistakes weirdness for being interesting, and tries to go for gross out shock value at the expense of almost everything else, like the lingering shots of splattered vomit that it mistakes as artistic. Fennell also struggles to stick the landing, offering a series of strained reveals in the last act that feel like too little too late, and could have just as easily been thought of after the fact. But it does build to a final scene that is at least memorable and unique, you can certainly give it that.

Saltburn opens exclusively in theatres in limited release on November 22nd.