What is there to write about a film that has already had so much written about it? Emerald Fennell’s comedy / psychological thriller has seemed to divide viewers, some thinking it’s just a bit silly, and others thinking it’s a masterpiece. I thought it was both, and therefore neither.

If you’re unfamiliar, the plot concerns a young lad from Prescott, Oliver, taking up a place at Oxford University. He is marginalised by the wealthy, entitled majority of toffs. After he confides that his social background is especially challenged, and that his father has suddenly died, a popular wealthy student, Felix, invites him to spend the summer with his family at their ancestral country mansion, Saltburn. Weirdly obsessive and comically macabre events ensue.

After the film was repeatedly recommended to me by friends, I streamed it at home. I suspect this isn’t the best way of experiencing it: the cinematography was the biggest star of this film. Aside from the odd misfire (there were a few too many ‘reflecting’ shots for me), it was aesthetically remarkable.

There were also some brilliant acting performances. Rosamund Pike entirely inhabited the character of Lady Elspeth, effortlessly treading the line between comedy and psychodrama. I also loved Archie Madekwe as Farleigh, a part that offered much more depth than his character in Gran Turismo. And Alison Oliver brought a beautifully unhinged quality to Venetia, which rescued some desperately uneven writing for that character.

I wasn’t sold on either of the two lead actors, though. Jacob Elordi’s performance was a bit flat, which was a problem when playing a ‘magnetic’ character. Barry Keoghan is a 31-year-old actor who didn’t read as an 18-year-old character. The less said about his ‘Scouse’ accent, which intermittently became his native Irish, the better.

But the main issue with the film was the writing: the plot was indecisive, the dialogue was startlingly stodgy, and the film as a whole seemed uncertain about its message. I’m not sure what I was supposed to take away from it.

There were several scenes which were clearly intended to shock, as though to lift the writing. These fell flat: the resolution of the plot undermined them, and the casting of a far-too-mature Keoghan considerably undercut the weirdness factor.

The comedy also falls flat. Fennell misunderstands what the rest of us find funny about people with inherited wealth. Fennell thinks it’s funny that, despite their wealth, the family live in closeted chaos. They don’t appreciate their wealth: despite a library, they all read Harry Potter. They care only for their own: they don’t know the names of their footmen. Their knowledge is limited by their experience: they don’t know where Liverpool is.

But none of that is funny, it’s just irritating. Fennell even seems to expect us to find the idea of fancy dress among the wealth amusing, as though ‘normal people’ imagine the fabulously wealthy to be clad in nothing but the latest designer clobber at every given moment.

At the risk of being a boorish man explaining a joke, the comedy lies in the absurdity of the assumption of entitlement. It is amusing that the owners of stately homes fail to appreciate the weird myopia of their ancestral claims: ‘it’s ours because it’s been in the family for generations’, without recognising that it’s also been in the community for generations, and the wealth only exists because of historic abuse of that community and its less fortunate inhabitants. The assumption that only their family, or only their class, are of worthy of consideration is ripe for ridicule, and is such a jarring contrast to the way most people live their lives as to be intrinsically funny.

To labour the point, there is no humour in Pike’s character not knowing the location of Liverpool. The humour ought to flow from the underlying assumption that she will never need to know where that is: an arched eyebrow, a dismissive ‘very well’, a look of profound disinterest; all would have served the script better than a brief discussion of whether Liverpool is by the sea. And hence, the comedy doesn’t land.

In Saltburn, Richard E Grant plays the same ‘unhinged wealthy father’ role that seems to be his stock-in-trade now: you could slot in one of his scenes from The Lesson and no-one would notice. Indeed, the thriller-ish elements of the plot are strikingly similar: they’re both about outsiders spending time in wealthy people’s country houses, where dark things happen. Heck, both have a rich kid called Felix as a central character. It’s remarkable that they were released only a few weeks apart.

For my money, The Lesson was the better film overall, though it received only a fraction of the media coverage of Saltburn. The Lesson may not have had the shock factor of Saltburn’s more unhinged scenes, but it had far more to say, and it said it more assertively. And the soundtrack of The Lesson blows the overdone, clichéd score of Saltburn out of the water.

So: Saltburn. It’s difficult to forgive a film that lacks both a coherent plot and meaningful insights, no matter how beautiful it looks. It ends up feeling just a bit disappointingly run-of-the-mill, a bit scripting-by-focus-group, a bit mass-market, a bit average. I’d hoped for better.

I’m not into cars. I once owned a PlayStation 2, but I’ve never played the racing simulator game after which this film is named. I’m patently not the target audience for this recently released Neill Blomkamp film. If it weren’t for my ‘new approach’ to going to the cinema, there’s no way on Earth that I’d have seen this.

The film is based on a true story. The main character is Jann Mardenborough, a young lad who is very skilled at the Gran Turismo computer game and is thereby recruited and trained up to drive real racing cars. The tension in the film comes from whether someone from outside can make it in the highly competitive world of racing… though, of course, the existence of the film is its own spoiler.

I sort of enjoyed this. It was too long—two hours and 14 minutes—and I could have done without all the extended racing sequences. I’ll confess that I had a bit of a micro-snooze in many of them. They didn’t seem to be doing anything particularly cinematically clever, and they didn’t really advance the plot, as the outcome was often plain from the start. Yet, I was captivated by Archie Madekwe’s performance as Mardenborough, and did find myself rooting for him.

But there were issues.

Firstly, some of the characterisation was awful. Orlando Bloom could not have been less convincing as PR man Danny Moore if his dialogue had been replaced by silent-film-style interstitials. It was awful. His character had essentially no narrative arc, his drive appeared to come entirely from wanting to promote Nissan, and his whole schtick was morally questionable given the life-and-death stakes for other characters. The character was poorly written, and Bloom wasn’t able to overcome that.

I didn’t recognise Ginger Spice Geri Horner as Lesley Mardenborough—I’m not good with celebrities—but did find myself wondering what had gone wrong in the film-making process. The delivery of her lines was so detached from the situations in which they took place that I found myself wondering if there had been a sickness-driven last-minute substitution or similar. This didn’t interfere with my enjoyment in any major way, though, as the character was so minor.

Which brings us to… the almost total absence of substantive roles for women in this film. Of the first twenty credited actors, only two are women. I don’t understand why you’d make that creative choice. Sure, if this was intended to be biographically accurate, then you’re limited, but it has been widely criticised for straying quite far from the facts. So why not make the creative choice to re-cast Bloom’s character as female? That could even supply a nice narrative arc as a female PR agent battles stereotypes to establish her credentials in a male-dominated industry. It’d be more satisfying than the main motivation being to sell more Nissans. I should acknowledge Maeve Courtier-Lilley, who managed to give some depth to her role despite only being given, like, five lines.

This is also a film that patronises. There are many scenes which begin with establishing shots of well-known skylines, overlaid with both the city and the country in large letters. For example: here’s the Eiffel Tower, let’s just overlay this shot with “PARIS, FRANCE” to make sure the audience really gets it. I’m afraid this really hit my funny bone, and I found myself audibly sniggering each time it happened. Plot points are also telegraphed: there’s a section of the film where Mardenborough must come in fourth place or better to progress, and this point is hammered home so many times for the audience that it begins to hurt.

But mostly… I don’t understand why the team decided to make the racing the main point of tension in the film when the outcome is obvious. It strikes me as a really odd creative decision, but maybe that’s because I’m under-appreciating the popular appeal of the racing sequences. There’s an underplayed subplot about Mardenborough’s relationship with his dad, and I think that’s where I would have located the heart of the film. There are interesting stages to their relationship: frustration at Jaan’s preference for computer games over physical sport; a feeling of exclusion driven by the expensive, elite nature of the sport; fatherly concern at the dangers involved; and, ultimately, reflection on the lack of support he provided. There’s a lot in there that could have been unpacked through the racing, with reconciliation perhaps serving as a more rewarding ending.

Perhaps what this whole review really says is: I don’t particularly warm to racing movies, and would have liked this to be an entirely different kind of film. Who knows? This is a film I would never, under normal circumstances, have seen or had any opinion on. I’m glad I saw it, and feel like I learned a little more about my own film preferences as a result.