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.

Let me say up front that this is the first film I’ve seen during this project that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen and which I’ve also really enjoyed. My socks weren’t blown off, but I did have a good time.

The plot concerns a tutor (played by Daryl McCormack) hired for a young lad who aspires to Oxford’s English Literature programme (played by Stephen McMillan). The lad’s parents are played by Julie Delpy and Richard E Grant. The setting is a large manor in the English countryside. Grant’s character is a successful novelist and McCormack’s character is an aspiring novelist, who also made one of Grant’s character’s novels the subject of his PhD. The family’s butler is played by Crispin Letts.

The plot is vaguely thriller-ish with revelations about the sources of plots, the family’s history, and the developing relationships between the characters. There’s a healthy dose of moral ambiguity to set the whole thing in motion.

McCormack plays his role beautifully: he has a real capacity to imbue his characters with complex layers, which is exactly what is required here. I’ve seen him previously in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande which was a less good film, but in which he also played a reasonably complex character.

Delpy is similarly brilliant, and McMillan manages to portray his character’s repressed emotional depth with complete veracity. Letts’s character felt underwritten—perhaps scenes were cut—which slightly undercut his character’s intriguing arc. I don’t recall seeing any of these three previously.

But for my money—and perhaps this just demonstrates that I don’t know anything about film—Grant’s performance was off-kilter in this film. His character, like the others, is complex with facets revealing themselves as the narrative progresses. But Grant’s characterisation read as uneven to me, as though he was playing different characters with different motivations at different points in the film, rather than a single character who we were getting to know more completely. I don’t think that was the intention, but perhaps I’ve misunderstood it.

One of the best things about this film was the music, composed by Isobel Waller-Bridge. Like all great film music, it disappeared into the background a lot of the time, but occasionally drove the plot, or even provided moments of real humour. There’s a moment of musical levity with a robot lawnmower, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.

Overall, this was great fun. I enjoyed watching it. It’s not the best film I’ve ever seen, but I’d happily watch it again if I had to. The plot is perhaps a bit contrived, but it is well done. It held my attention throughout, was intriguing, and had some really fun moments too. The slightly rubbish trailer undersells it. It’s worth 103 minutes of your time.