Emerald Fennel's unhinged class thriller 2023 film Saltburn, follows scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) who befriends the aristocratic, brooding Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites Oliver to stay at his sprawling family home in the summer holidays. We follow Oliver’s journey as he is invited into the cold, detached tradition of the blue blood. The film touches on themes of desire and obsession and as I watched it, I spotted multiple points of literary reference and intertextuality, including Brideshead Revisited, Brontë and Shakespeare.
And a very obvious warning before you continue to read on: there will be spoilers!
The Ophelia-Venetia parallel
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia struggles with agency over her own life, and her relationships with men throughout the play restrict her own agency, and it inevitably leads to her death. Our initial introduction to Venetia in Saltburn, is with her mother, Elspeth, saying “she’s been draping herself around the house all day” waiting for Oliver’s arrival, implying that she is promiscuous and easily becomes infatuated, or else that she bases her self-worth and happiness on her relationships with men. Another example of this is when Venetia says to Oliver that he’s “better than last year’s one”.
Water is an important and frequent motif surrounding Ophelia, and it has connotations of her sensitive femininity and emotion, and we frequently see Venetia surrounded by water. The frame below of Venetia lying off of a dock with her hair cascading into the water is remarkably similar to Millais’ 1852 painting of Ophelia (see below). In Hamlet, Ophelia ends up in a state of madness caused by Hamlet’s actions which inevitably leads to her watery demise. In both Saltburn and Hamlet, it is unclear whether Ophelia and Venetia's deaths are self-inflicted or not. The onomastics of Venetia’s name: Venetia which means ‘from Venice’ in Italian, and Venice is slowly being submerged under water, which potentially foreshadows her suicide as she slits her wrists and bleeds to death in the bath.
Alison Oliver as Venetia in Saltburn
Millais’ 1852 painting ‘Ophelia’
The links to Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
In an interview with GQ magazine, Fennel said: “They [Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi] were playing the kind of Sebastian Flyte character [from Brideshead Revisited]. The thing about someone like Felix is he has no self-awareness. He’s the only one not putting on a part because he doesn’t have to. And Jacob fundamentally understood that he’s just some bloke. He’s shallow, and callous, and misogynistic, and not that clever, but he’s also got that weaponised charm down to a T. He’s so beautiful that you just don’t care.”
The two texts begin very similarly with the protagonist (Oliver in Saltburn and Charles in Brideshead) attending the University of Oxford and become infatuated with the son of a very wealthy aristocratic family. This new friend (or love interest) invites the protagonist to stay at their eponymous family home and is drawn into the family's web. Most explicitly, at the beginning of Saltburn, Oliver mentions that Felix’s life sounds like a Waugh novel, and Felix says that Waugh was obsessed with Saltburn, the family stately home. Peter Bradshaw (prolific British writer and film critic) says that the purpose of these lines is “to pre-empt the obvious Brideshead comparison”. However, Fennell has replaced the Brideshead’s interest in Christianity and spirituality with an examination of class and privilege, and her central love story is both more explicitly queer and transgressive.
Saltburn also engages with Brideshead’s themes of identity and belonging. While Brideshead is mostly interested in Catholic identity and faith, Saltburn is interested in class and wealth. Both Charles and Oliver are fascinated by their friend’s family’s lavish lifestyle, even though both characters are middle-class. But despite their middle-class status (although Oliver lies about his boring middle class life and instead plays into Felix’s innate attraction to this apparently working-class son of a drug-addict and alcoholic parents), neither character ultimately belongs in this upper-class world. Charles is eventually estranged from the Flytes after Julia decides she can’t marry him because of her Catholic faith, and Oliver must resort to scheming and even murder to finally feel at home at Saltburn.
Vampiric and Gothic conventions in Saltburn
In the daylight, Saltburn is the ultimate escape, we see the characters lounging in lush fields and swimming in gorgeous ponds. They spend time out in the sunlight with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (a literary staple in the summer of 2007). These moments are light, free and the perfect encapsulation of summertime for the rich, where they are seen. At night however, Saltburn takes on an eerie quality. Venetia (Alison Oliver) wanders the grounds in her nightgown as if she were a spirit haunting the estate. A mist rolls in, and the score turns sinister. The film evokes a feeling of unease in these night-time moments. You’re not sure what will go wrong, but you’re certain something will happen. The film contains other hallmarks of gothic stories, including both unhealthy romance and sexual repression. Interestingly enough, both of these can be found in Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan). We see him express an unhealthy desire for others in his orbit, often admiring them from a distance, in a voyeuristic way. He uses sex in destructive and problematic ways when it benefits him. At the same time, there also seems to be a level of repression within him as if he’s not sure what to do with everything he’s feeling. Saltburn also focuses on death quite a bit.
Each character has been visited by death in some way, which has (of course) had an effect on them. Death visits Saltburn over the course of the film, transforming an idyllic summer into an immense tragedy. The way the story is constructed, it does feel as though something otherworldly may be happening to these characters. Only at the end is it truly revealed what has happened. Fennel has also said in interviews with Bracknell News that Saltburn is “Certainly, metaphorically a vampire film”, and in Oliver and Venetia’s scene where they engage in oral copulation in the garden when Venetia is menstruating, Oliver says “Lucky for you, I’m a vampire.” Which is the most explicit instance of Oliver as a Vampiric figure in the film.
The Grave Scene and Wuthering Heights
The scandalous and frankly unorthodox desecration of Felix’s grave is a clear allusion to Wuthering Heights; I think it’s about grief. It’s about love. It’s an attempt from Oliver to get some form of impossible closure and come to terms with Felix’s death. I think the reason that scene is so long is because we as an audience needed to witness the whole emotional journey of Oliver as he is consumed by guilt for murdering Felix.
In Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, after Cathy dies, there is a moment where Heathcliff digs down to her coffin and tries to get to her. It’s very clear what he’s intending to do, which is to – at the very least – touch her, kiss her. The clear parallels drawn between Saltburn and Wuthering Heights is a clear relation to the Gothic tradition where sex and death are co-mingled and strangely intertwined. Whilst some viewers have deemed this scene unnecessary and crude, it could be read as a pure expression of grief, loss, and desire born out of frustration. Oliver eventually comes to acknowledge that this express of obsession is futile, ridiculous, and pathetic.
In conclusion, the countless literary references significantly enrich the viewing experience of Saltburn, highlighting the Gothic and tragic elements of Emerald Fennel’s craft; it was a lot of fun to unpick and piece together all the instances of literary allusions and I sincerely hope you enjoyed my indulgence in some intertextual debauchery.