Like the environment, politicsand above all, the economic tension between the ultra-rich and the rest of the world continues to grow, it’s a subject that continues to produce dark, memorable films – from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar winner Parasite to 2022 The menu, PigAnd Triangle of sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest film festival, including this year’s Nick Stahl film What you wish and the thrilling Brazilian film Property. Emerald green Fennell Salt burnwhich played as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, also seems like a perfect fit: it follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, who will surely appear in the awards conversation again) as he clumsily infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is part horror film, part classic Gothic novel, as Oliver longs to look like Felix – or just be Felix.
But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell told Polygon that she doesn’t quite understand it Salt burn as yet another eat-the-rich exercise.
“I guess I think of it more as ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, then bite the rich and then swallow them,’” she said.
Image: Prime
Salt burn is an intoxicating experience: a visually rich, biting crime thriller along the lines of The talented Mr. Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes some time to fully unfold in the film, is obsessed with the luxury, comfort and casual arrogance of Felix and his wealthy family. But as they spend more time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him to Saltburn, the family estate, they also drop hints that he is probably just the toy of the season, likely to be thrown away out of boredom.
Fennell’s film – her sequel to the challenging, much-discussed revenge story Promising young woman – is not entirely sympathetic to Oliver, who is clearly grasping, needy and ruthless. At the same time, it also does not completely agree with Felix and his superficial, selfish relatives.
“It’s really about always being sympathetic to everyone,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director – and also for the actors – it must always be an exercise in empathy. None of these people consider themselves a bad person. The same was the case with Promising young woman. I’m not interested in doing things that make moral judgments about people; all I’m interested in is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver, against his better judgment, would be completely and utterly seduced.
As Fennell has explained in other interviews: Salt burn is a film about fame, fandom, the Internet and parasocial relationships, about the kinds of connections people make at a distance and build into elaborate, often unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the kind of superstar a fandom would deserve: he’s handsome, charming, and skilled at everything he tries, but he’s also surprisingly likable.
“The thing about Felix is we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell said. ‘And then, the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist him. They are all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the start why, against our better judgement, we would all want to be at Saltburn and do anything to get in and do anything to stay.
Image: Prime
Both Salt burn And Promising young woman are about toxic hunger, about a protagonist who is so monomaniacal about getting something that they are willing to cut every moral corner to get there. As for other connections, Fennell says her own obsessions may be on display in the new film.
“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think I definitely have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as moviegoers. Promising young woman looked at the specific genre of the revenge film with a female lead. Salt burn looks at the Gothic country house tradition. Promising young woman wanted to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I hope to do here.”
The reason Salt burn feels like so many classic British stories about class, Gothic mansions and dark secrets, because Fennell wanted the film to be a recognizable world, a genre exercise in which viewers think they know what the rules are and what comes next.
“Only with that exposure can you really push and delve into the genre,” Fennell said. “So stylistically, I will always be concerned with where a film exists in the film world. You can’t pretend that there is a movie outside the world.”
As for other comparisons to her work, Fennell notes that both Promising young woman And Salt burn his thwarted love stories. “They are stories about what we do with love that for whatever reason cannot exist, that cannot continue in the form in which it begins. Promising young woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Bo Burnham’s character Ryan – they both love things like that that can’t work. And Salt burn is a film about loving someone, and loving their world – a world that will never love you again. What are you doing? What do you do to yourself when that becomes clear? How do you get that love?”
It may seem a bit counterintuitive to compare internet fame to gothic novels such as Bride’s head Revisited, Wuthering HeightsAnd Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks these books and online obsessions are closely linked.
Image: Prime
“There is always tension, alwaysbetween ourselves and other people,” she said. “If the Gothic tradition is about an outsider introduced to a world that is both desirable and frightening – that is absolutely what we are doing with the internet and our relationship with the world of fame and beauty.
“Online, fame is no longer just about people. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their closets, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think now more than ever – and especially post-COVID – we’re in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I myself certainly feel a new desire after the COVID-19 crisis to touch.”
Referring to one of the more visceral and much-described scenes in Salt burn, in which Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell said, “I think it makes sense that this film is in many ways concerned with human separation in some form. There is now, post-COVID, a violation of touching and feeling, and becoming intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition has always been about. It was about introducing people, but especially women, to this idea of transgressive desire and things that might not be within reason. They are beyond reason, they become completely all-consuming.”
Salt burn is in theaters now.