After an hour, all of it went sideways, with Oliver revealed to be an excellent deal much less naïve than he offered himself as. He’s only a mess. But the halo of “Brideshead Revisited” remained. It’s an primarily theological e-book about magnificence, want and conversion, written by Waugh within the wake of hardship and containing a thickly slathered nostalgia for the methods of the fading aristocracy within the years surrounding the world wars. Fennell, in the meantime, has said that she set “Saltburn” in 2006-07 to “undercut the glamour,” and there’s little or no admiration for the luxury settings within the movie. For probably the most half, they’re seen as nearly vulgar, indexes of style with out the style behind them. Whereas Charles Ryder, the Oliver character in “Brideshead,” is interested in the sweetness, historical past and transcendence of the nice home and the damaged household that inhabits it, and finds there some grander everlasting consequence, Oliver is working from a extra base intuition: the acquisitive must have what he feels he’s been denied in his circle of relatives’s boring, ethical, middle-class existence.

In different phrases, Oliver is simply as vulgar as all of them. The film makes no indication (as some disgruntled viewers instructed) that he’s meant to signify an entire class of individuals bent on stealing from the wealthy. He’s simply the inversion of a extra harmless literary prototype, one whom readers and viewers see as their very own emissary into the glamorous world of the nice home. This is a film, in essence, about these sorts of films.

In an interview, Fennell said that “Saltburn” is “a satire about our fixation with films like this” — therefore the imperious strains of “Zadok the Priest” proper from the beginning. To satirize a style is, by definition, to magnify and poke enjoyable at its trappings. The purpose is to point out how ridiculous the style is within the first place. So we’ve our Oliver, who goes past the straightforward beauty-besotted poor child of different tales to truly simply be boring, predictable, craven, the worst. Like the scariest type of villains, he doesn’t even actually have a lot of a purpose to be this manner, apart from he desires to. We too have Felix’s kinfolk, who all consider themselves as very beneficiant and posh and are literally sociopathically self-involved, hermetically sealed of their property. The home continues to be grand, with its fountains and ceramics and cocktails and hedge maze, however the folks in it are small-minded and peculiar and perhaps slightly extra human than their predecessors within the style.

That Oliver, ultimately, seems to be a foul and conniving freak is each apparent from the beginning and a means of sticking a thumb within the eye of the style. He learns no classes, reaches no conclusions, attains no heights of religious transformation. But he’s additionally not a genius con artist; at occasions, he’s type of an fool and definitely pitiable. Instead of experiencing awe or want and even nostalgia for the manor he makes himself lord of, we notice how foolish this entire factor is. It’s not a film about class. It’s a film about foolishness — his, and ours.

Others have completed this, in fact, in several methods; the entire “Knives Out” franchise, as an example, is taking part in with related concepts, most likely with slightly extra talent. But the enjoyable of “Saltburn” is that Fennell wraps the large mess in a sweet coating, and the result’s a bit like Skittles, after the packet has been left within the solar: some have melted collectively, every part tainted by the style of plastic.

This satire gained’t finish the style as a result of the style has type of ended itself, however “Saltburn” is lots glad to kick the ruins round, throw again half a bottle of Veuve Clicquot after which sneer and flip you the chook. We know by now that it’s not for everybody. But I certain had a blast. As for you, to borrow one other phrase from the meme-making youths: Your mileage might range.