Saltburn: A Master Class in Tone

I was lucky enough to see Saltburn by Emerald Fennell at an advance screening at the Austin Film Festival last month. It was a packed house! (And by the way, while we're talking about Austin Film Festival, a shout-out to our six students who were finalists. Eric Potempa, Jonathan Finnegan, Kelly McAllister and Nancy Safavi were all finalists for the pitch competition with Nancy taking third place overall. Erin Brown Thomas was a finalist for her short film, Subtext. And Meredith Allen, former student and former faculty member at Jacob Krueger Studio, was a finalist for her horror film Sensei. We’re just so proud of all our alums who are out there doing amazing stuff and having such incredible success.)  There is so much that we can learn as screenwriters from Saltburn. It’s one of those films that pushes the edges in every way – that makes you laugh in the most uncomfortable ways, that makes you feel, that both entertains you and concerns you.  Saltburn, is of course, Emerald Fennell's follow up to Promising Young Woman. By looking at a movie that takes everything this far, we can learn about tone, we can learn about genre, we can learn about writing characters that should be unlikable and still make the audience fall in love with them.  To really help you understand Saltburn, I'm going to have to reveal a few spoilers right at the very beginning. So if you don't want the film spoiled, you might want to watch it first. If you read on, I'm going to give you enough context to understand what we're talking about here. In a lot of ways, you can think of Saltburn like The Talented Mr. Ripley on steroids.  It's The Talented Mr. Ripley with the volume turned up even louder, with things pushed to even more ridiculous extremes.  Structurally, Saltburn is built on a thriller framework. The genre elements and the genre structure of Saltburn are pulled directly from thriller.  It's a story about a young man, Oliver Quick, played by Barry Keoghan. He’s a student at Oxford University and he’s super bright but he has no money. And at Oxford that means he's a bit of an outcast.  He develops a sexual attraction and a friendship attraction towards Felix Catton, a ridiculously wealthy student who lives in a grand castle. Felix has everything that Oliver has ever wanted. Emerald Fennell talks about the film as a Gothic romance. To her, this story could just as well be Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a story of a really complicated unrequited love.  But at the same time Saltburn is a Gothic romance with a lot of twisted stuff happening, it's also a thriller. It's also a pushed to the limits version of The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Emerald Fennell’s screenplay for Saltburn is fusing genres in ways we can all learn from as screenwriters.  So here's what happens. Felix becomes Oliver's best friend and invites Oliver to live with him at his ridiculously huge castle estate, Saltburn, for the summer because Oliver has nowhere to go. Oliver has told Felix that his mother is a drug addict, that his father has died, that he doesn't speak to his family. He has nowhere to go. He has no finances. And he basically becomes not only the friend but also the plaything to this ridiculously privileged kid. Felix is incredibly sexy. Every woman in the world is just throwing herself at him. And although it seems like it's an unrequited love story, it certainly seems like there's some kind of attraction between Oliver and Felix. In fact,