At the outset, Saltburn may not look like your typical vampire movie, as it’s not quite giving Twilight vibes, but as writer/director Emerald Fennell explains, that’s exactly what it is. She shared an anecdotal conversation between herself and the film’s cinematographer, Oscar winner Linus Sandgren (La La Land), who asked her what word comes to mind when she thinks of her film.
“And I said, ‘vampire.’ It’s a vampire movie. And we don’t know who the vampire is,” Fennell told me during a media roundtable I participated in on behalf of Art U News this past October. “And even at the end, we don’t really know who the vampires are and that everyone’s kind of sucking something, you know?”
Fennell was in town last month as part of the Mill Valley Film Festival; Saltburn was screened as a spotlight film, and she was honored with the Mind the Gap award for Filmmaker of the Year.
Saltburn, opening in theaters this week, is Fennell’s highly anticipated follow-up film to 2020’s Promising Young Woman, which received five Oscar nominations in 2021, including Best Picture. Fennell walked away with an Oscar win for Best Original Screenplay.
Her debut feature sparked plenty of debate and discourse—especially over the film’s shocking final act—and with Saltburn, Fennell is poised to fan the flames regarding power and privilege.
Set in the early aughts, Saltburn is centered on Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin) who, while studying at Oxford University, finds himself taken with the confident and ever-popular Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, Euphoria), who invites his seemingly quiet schoolmate home during break to his family’s sprawling estate, Saltburn. Also starring Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Carey Mulligan, Archie Madekwe, and Alison Oliver, Saltburn is a lush portrait of unrelenting obsession and power over the course of a salacious summer.
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