Raymond Chandler remarked: The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
He could have said this about Saltburn where class consciousness is coded in the English DNA like nowhere else and furnishes enough material to retain funding, however threadbare it is.
The themes of Saltburn are like pieces filched from Howard's End and Brideshead Revisited and no doubt other, lesser, books about country piles, as well as the 1930s detective novels that Chandler was referring to in his spiking of English writing.
Class, real estate and sex could be the holy trinity of a certain type of English writing, lazy, dilettantish and effete. Add Oxford undergrads to the plot and the languorous destiny of the story is foreknown in the opening credits.
With such worn material adding some spice is required and thus, drinking bodily fluids, instigating - or simulating - necrophilia through a meter of dirt on a grave, should supply the necessary frisson to an audience that could be comatose. These disingenuous tactics, however, do not dispel Chandler's remark of it being dull. Immeasurably so.
Nor does the photographic eroticism of the demi-monde in the fields and the sunlight flaring in the lenses cover up the shallow sentiments displayed. Rather like the cliché parents of Saltburn, who talk like stock characters from a 1930s parlour play that ought to have been forgotten, these tropes should be in a theatrical and cinematic op-shop.
But where it really falls over is the end which chooses facile plotting to provide some ending with its redundant ballet through the newly acquired pile; intended to show victorious power, though it comes across rather like Benjamin Field.
A hollow, grubby, film which ought to have understood the motto at the beginning of Brideshead: Et in Arcadia ego.
He could have said this about Saltburn where class consciousness is coded in the English DNA like nowhere else and furnishes enough material to retain funding, however threadbare it is.
The themes of Saltburn are like pieces filched from Howard's End and Brideshead Revisited and no doubt other, lesser, books about country piles, as well as the 1930s detective novels that Chandler was referring to in his spiking of English writing.
Class, real estate and sex could be the holy trinity of a certain type of English writing, lazy, dilettantish and effete. Add Oxford undergrads to the plot and the languorous destiny of the story is foreknown in the opening credits.
With such worn material adding some spice is required and thus, drinking bodily fluids, instigating - or simulating - necrophilia through a meter of dirt on a grave, should supply the necessary frisson to an audience that could be comatose. These disingenuous tactics, however, do not dispel Chandler's remark of it being dull. Immeasurably so.
Nor does the photographic eroticism of the demi-monde in the fields and the sunlight flaring in the lenses cover up the shallow sentiments displayed. Rather like the cliché parents of Saltburn, who talk like stock characters from a 1930s parlour play that ought to have been forgotten, these tropes should be in a theatrical and cinematic op-shop.
But where it really falls over is the end which chooses facile plotting to provide some ending with its redundant ballet through the newly acquired pile; intended to show victorious power, though it comes across rather like Benjamin Field.
A hollow, grubby, film which ought to have understood the motto at the beginning of Brideshead: Et in Arcadia ego.