• Courtesy Of MGM And Amazon Studios
• Barry Keoghan gets a star turn in Emerald Fennell's gorgeous but muddled social satire.

You might remember Irish actor Barry Keoghan from his scene-stealing, Oscar-nominated turn as a rural lout in last year's The Banshees of Inisherin or his chilling performance as a vengeful teen in Yorgos Lanthimos' The Killing of a Sacred Deer. He's one of those supporting actors who make a lasting impression, but he hasn't had a high-profile lead role — until now. Keoghan is top billed in Saltburn, the second feature from Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), a film in a genre that might best be described as "If you can't eat the rich, join them."

The deal

Oliver Quick (Keoghan) is a first-year scholarship student at Oxford University who struggles to stand out among his upper-class peers. But after he does a good turn for Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), crown prince of the campus elite, Felix takes Oliver under his wing.

Oliver is mesmerized by everything about Felix, while Felix is titillated by Oliver's tales of a drug-dealing dad and squalid home life. When the story takes a tragic turn, Felix expresses his sympathy by inviting Oliver to spend the summer at his family's palatial country estate, Saltburn.

There Oliver quickly endears himself to Felix's spacey, titled parents (Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant) and his troubled sister (Alison Oliver). A harder nut to crack is Felix's American cousin (Archie Madekwe), who sees Oliver as a threat to his status as the designated poor relation. Tensions heat up as Oliver worms his way deeper into the heart of the lush estate and its dysfunctional owners.

Will you like it?

Saltburn proves that a film can remind you of a dozen good movies and still not be a good movie. It has all the ingredients of a transgressive, class-conscious, boundary-breaking erotic thriller, including a big midpoint twist and at least two outrageous scenes that are sure to pop up in amateur online montages. But, much like the infamous Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man, Saltburn ends up being more fun to meme than to watch.

What went wrong? Shot on Kodak film by Oscar winner Linus Sandgren, the movie certainly looks good. The boxy Academy aspect ratio may evoke the days of watching movies on VHS, but the reds and greens are oil-painting sumptuous, and the smoky dorm rooms and cafeterias have a lived-in quality. (The film is mostly set in 2006, just far enough in the past for indoor smoking to be the norm.) When the Cattons stage elaborate dinner parties or a fête with the theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream, we share Oliver's yearning to partake of their privilege.

The performances are uniformly strong, too. The role of Oliver might as well have been written for Keoghan; it gives him a chance to showcase his wide range, from awkward and self-loathing to sly and shifty to preening and sinister. Elordi incarnates golden-boyness; now that he's played Elvis, that might as well be his brand. As Sir James and Lady Elspeth, Pike and Grant underplay deliciously and get laughs with tossed-off lines. (My favorite of these cleverly scripted bits is Elspeth's narcissistic theory that she was the inspiration for Pulp's depiction of the clueless rich in the anthem "Common People.") Even Carey Mulligan is in the mix, as a houseguest to whom Elspeth refers as "Poor Dear Pamela" while trashing her ruthlessly behind her back.

But here's where signs of trouble appear, because Poor Dear Pamela has no purpose in the story except mild comic relief. She's there and then gone without affecting Oliver's trajectory. As the movie lurches into its second half, the wealthy characters begin to feel less like people and more like placeholders. Their motivations make little sense; their antagonism is token and easily overcome. As any meaningful source of conflict disappears, Saltburn becomes dull to watch — except when it's being deliberately outré.

It's hard to explain why the film's story falls flat without spoiling the midpoint reversal. Suffice it to say that Fennell turns one hackneyed narrative inside out only to reveal a second hackneyed narrative, and her script never digs any deeper. We're asked to be shocked by developments that are, to be frank, predictable, and in the process, any pretense of meaningful class satire goes out the window.

With its tagline "We're all about to lose our minds," Saltburn's marketing suggests that the Cattons' lifestyle is an absurdist bacchanal, half Barry Lyndon and half Midsommar. Actually, it's pretty chill — I would hang out with these people in their beautiful house, even if they are allergic to normal human emotion. The movie is about surfaces, just like the Cattons' life. There's no core of unruly passion in those meme-worthy scenes, nothing to connect to. What looks like a banquet of excess turns out to be a little stale.

If you like this, try...

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999; MGM+, Paramount+, rentable): If there's one movie that clearly influenced Saltburn, it's this Oscar-winning adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel, but Ripley digs far deeper into the psyche of its protagonist.

The Servant (1963; BFI Player Classics, rentable): Saltburn also draws on tropes of the British art-house cinema of the swinging '60s, which often involved upstairs-downstairs clashes and erotic power games. Dirk Bogarde stirs up an aristocratic household in this Harold Pinter adaptation.

Withnail and I (1987; Max): Watching a restrained, patriarchal Grant in Saltburn made me nostalgic for this cult film in which he chews the scenery as a down-on-his-luck actor taking a country holiday infinitely less glamorous than the one in this movie.