To think Saltburn was a bit shit

@Allfur I think it’s great that you acknowledge how hard it is for female directors, but I think it’s a bit much to expect people to never have a critical reaction to the work a female director creates. I don’t think any woman director (or woman professional in any field) wants to be infantilised. Emerald Fennell will not be in the least affected by us having a conversation about a film she made. It’s part of the job and there will be greater critics (and greater fans) with much more relevance to her than a handful of anonymous people on mumsnet. It really is okay for us to discuss our opinions of the film honestly. No one has said anything personal or unwarranted.

Why do you care what she thinks? Also do you realise you’re on an online forum where people are allowed, within reason, to express their opinions?

I'm sure directors love having their work called shit and unoriginal

Nobody is being 'torn down'.

Emerald Fennell made a film for public consumption. We, the public, are entitled to critique it. None of the comments I have seen here have been of a personal nature.

It was a strange combination of interesting and boring.

But by god, at least it wasn't Antman, or another superhero movie.

Most successful English actors are of public school boy/girl ilk, acting schools are elitist and unaffordable for working class students.

The same has been afforded to Emerald Fennel, she was brilliant as CPB in The Crown however. But she may grow into a great director in time.

I was at Oxford in the mid 1980s. 30% of students were women, 70% men, and at my college 10% were state educated, 90% private or public school, so I was a real outlier and simply clueless about how much wealthier than me ALL my friends were. It made a huge difference to everything - to what they did in the holidays, to how they dressed, what they got up to at weekends, what job opportunities they had.

I was the only one with severe money worries the whole time , the only one who worked through every holiday and returned exhausted, not having done all the reading because I was doing full time shop work, office work and waitressing. there was zero understanding in those days that social class affected performance or mental well being. It seems a lot more balanced and aware/supportive these days.

Also tons of money and industry connections and the safe knowledge that you can flop catastrophically at the box office and still have an incredibly comfortable life also helps. I'll hang on to my hat for those who have actual skin in the game I think, Emerald Fennell is loaded.

Overall, I liked it. But three scenes felt gratuitous / shock value / unnecessary and spoiled it for me

Christ, this was hard work. Beautifully shot in places, painfully dark in others.

It reminded me of the sort of self absorbed work some drama students produce, purely for their own indulgence.

Oh, and I was eating my breakfast when the bath scene happened. Boak.

So do I.

It’s bloody hard work. (Junior doctors don’t have a clue how many hours some people put in, and it’s a lot less well paid.)

It takes a huge amount of energy, creativity and self belief to write and direct films, I take my hat off to any woman who manages to do it, rather than tear them down

Yes Ive just looked up the figures and staggered that it was actually 50/50. I think his collage must have been an outlier. I can only remember a handful of ‘normal’ type students and his year group wasn’t massive so he knew most of them. Unless they were all reverse Oliver’s and were masquerading as posh people

Actually I’ve looked it up now and it was about 50-50 overall when I was there so my college may have had more state school students than average. State school students were the majority - just - by 2006 so definitely having had just a few state pupils in a college of hundreds must have been unusual.

That’s unusual, I think. I was there in the 90s (from a state school) and we were the majority even then. Maybe it varies by college.

Everything was very convenient rather than inevitable and well plotted (unlike in, say, the far superior The Talented Mr Ripley). The flashback sequence at the end to ‘explain’ everything was unforgivable and actually explained nothing. That was not a clever or well thought out murder plot and it’s frankly amazing that all of these things just happened to work out for him 🙄 Stylish weak nonsense imo. Nowhere near as elegant as the films it was emulating (Ripley, Brideshead, etc). Great cast though.

Agree it was icky couldn't finish watching it.

Maybe today but DH went circa 2010 and there were literally a handful of people from state education in his collage, and most of them were still pretty MC. Most of the students he met were very wealthy, wonderfully eccentric, and completely bonkers.

It's a bit like Emerald Fennell watched Parasite and thought hmm, but what if the rich people were the real victims.

She's got a way of marketing her films that's initially appealing but there's no substance at all when you actually think about them. Promising Young Woman was billed as a rape revenge film and SPOILERS there was no actual revenge or comeuppance in it at all. The lead character did nothing beyond scold them men she lured home, her grand revenge plot was a flop and led to her very predictable death (which the camera lingered on in true male-gaze style) and Fennell's idea of resolution was that she called the cops from beyond the grave. I think we all know with the rates of conviction for rape, and cops famously taking historic rape cases seriously, how well that case would've gone. Oh and the worst punishments in the film were all meted out to women.

Good movie, enjoyed it. Not a wow movie but good enough.

Barry the actor was really good though, and he deserves all the attention he's getting.

A bit of a cliche, and halfway through the movie I could tell the ending.

I loved it. Sure, it was a bit silly but it was very entertaining.

That's pretty much what DS said. It's a really conservative film about uppity middle class oiks jeopardising the extreme wealth of the aristocracy. With some shit shocker scenes. He was very unimpressed.

Completely agree. Sure it was entertaining but it lacked any sort of depth and had some mixed messages, characters weren’t particularly deep and a few characters who didn’t need to be in it. Very rushed ending and all to convenient. Loved promising young woman, thought it was a hundred times better.

My DD watched 20 minutes of it before standing up and declaring the movie terrible so we turned it off.

I enjoyed some bits of it and I laughed out loud more than a few times. The cinematography was beautiful and some scenes stick with me now. But overall, I don't enjoy the film. The icky bits just felt like they were there to get attention and the plot as a whole was incredibly contrived towards the end.

I'm also just quite simple when it comes to characters and Saltburn didn't satisfy me. I want a satisfying ending not ambiguity: either everyone should be truly awful and destroying each other, or I want a side to root for even if they aren't perfect. The family had their flaws but with film playing it for laughs and Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant being so amazing, they just came off as initially self centred but harmless followed by massively sympathetic when their children died. The character of Oliver just never felt developed enough for me to care for him at all, even in an anti-hero way.

"Shitty morals character with not enough development for me to care about him exploits unpleasant but harmlessly daft rich people" isn't really a film I care about.