Another outsourced review of The Times by Wesley Morris gave this a terrible rating, and boring. It is anything but.
As I wrote about when doing my own review of Promising Young Woman, the question the writer is asking (of herself and of us, as watchers) is whether or not the main character is in love with a secondary character. In Promising Young Woman, if you look closely, you can see that she wasn’t just devastated by the suicide of her friend after her friend had been group raped, she was devastated by the loss of her love.
In this, Oliver (Barry Keoghan) appears to be in love with an upper class college student named Felix (Jacob Elordi). He gets himself invited to spend the summer at his family’s estate which is called Saltburn. And then he starts to get a little weird. It’s riveting and not at all boring. By the time you understand what is actually going on it becomes a little like the end of PYW when they find the locket. It all comes together in a kind of tied up package. Oh… he’s a clever psychopath. But the question still remains, did he love Felix? He even asks this question over and over at the beginning of the movie and then the camera cuts away suddenly, as if he finally realized the answer but the director decided not to let us hear him. Later, when we return to that room, we find out. The uber rich live like they have no predators… except one.
Anyway, the reviewer this time has (I’m quoting) has written about the moral force of civilian cellphone videos, Hollywood’s addiction to racial reconciliation fantasies, and the endangerment of romantic comedies. I don’t think he was the right person to review this very entertaining movie. Stick to articles about cellphones.