Saltburn is a gross movie that is worth a watch.

Over the holidays I watched the movie Saltburn. There's going to be spoilers in my commentary regarding this movie, so if you intend to watch it, you may want to skip on what I have to say about it. The summary/synopsis of this movie is that a student attending what I think is Oxford University gets drawn into the world of an aristocratic family (who are a bunch of vipers), and they invite him to his eccentric family's sprawling estate for a summer. However, it turns out that this innocent student is a murdering psychopath with all sorts of weird sexual things that he likes to do. In short, there is not a single likeable character in this entire film.

Most people describe the film as shocking because (I think) it leans so heavily into its grossness. I happened to watch it with two polyamory friends who are no stranger to gross and who are remarkably gross in their sexual lives. Thus, they really liked it, which I thought was interesting. I guess that "people just being so real and visceral" is one of the things that is lacking in entertainment these days, and they were surprised that a film would come out that so fully represented them. I'll just say this: the "what the f*ck's?" per minute are very high in this flick, if not "per second" in many of the scenes.

The main character, an "Oliver Quick" by name played by Barry Keoghan is really weird. He reminds me of a character from The Polar Express in some ways...mostly human, but something is clearly missing. However, despite the movie having likeable characters and an overabundance of extremely awkward scenes, I still kind of liked it. A lot of this works because of the visuals and the performance of the characters. And once you realize what's going on, there's an open-eyed appreciation of how every gross, extremely nasty thing is shot in such loving, visceral close-up that underlines everyone's discomfort at what they're watching. As a warning to anyone that is interested in actually watching it, I will let you know there's a lot of body fluids. It often made me ask why we are so uncomfortable with body fluids since we all have bodies and they are filled with fluid. However...just take my word for it.

I think it also says a bit about class divisions that exist in England. This movie shows something called "the owning class," because they own vast swathes of land that have been handed down for generations, and they can just live off the rent and never have to work. What that does to people and their morality is that it can tie it in a knot that seems really foreign to the working class. Indecipherable even. As most of you know, middle class people (like the psychopathic student Oliver) come from comfortable, privileged backgrounds but they are ultimately still expected to work for a living. When you set this at a university where both classes mix, you see a lot of middle class people pretending to be working class and exaggerating about how "poor" they are, because being working class carries some social capital whereas being middle class is just boring.

You might ask then if the movie has a point. I think it does. The point of the movie was to own a great big country estate without being born into an inheritance. The title of the movie, Saltburn, takes its name from an estate that is at the center of the film. It's a beautiful place of old money. Mansions like Saltburn are handed down through the generations, so it's not like you can just buy one. The only way to get one is to be born into the family or marry into the family or (third option) do what Oliver does in the movie and just get it at the end by killing everyone and never getting caught. Basically, the message of the movie is that the upper class in the UK is so extremely far from even the comfortable middle class, that class mobility to their level is basically impossible for a decent person.

All in all, Saltburn was an incredibly strange film. Did anyone else watch it and care to comment? I'd love to hear your thoughts regarding the bathtub scene or the funeral scene (two of the grossest things in the movie).