I was writer-director Emerald Fennell’s target audience for Saltburn: a British Gen Zer that takes great pleasure in sneering at upper-class Oxford types and loves anything vacuous. I expected that it would be like a posh Skins, with bratty toffs spraying Dom Perignon into each other’s mouths instead of a six-pack of the cheapest beer. I was told by even my most stylish of friends that it was like TikTok-ified Brideshead Revisited, or The Talented Mr. Ripley with a bit of softcore pornography. They are friends no longer, dropped for having such bad opinions, now that I’ve had a few days to mull over the single worst film I have ever watched.

The film, Fennell’s second after 2020’s grad school thesis of a film Promising Young Woman, opens with Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) joining the class of 2006 at Oxford University. Quite impressively for the mid-aughts, the setting marked by background music (Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, etc.) manages to evoke little to no nostalgia at all. The few attempts at taking us back 20 years were off target. Slapping a physically repulsive eyebrow piercing on Felix Catton (an Adonis-like Jacob Elordi), the posh aristo who doesn’t really care about anything, doesn’t make him less of a cliche but more of one. Oliver sports a pair of rectangular wire rimmed glasses in that mid-aughts shape that didn’t look good on anyone. Oxford is presented as a dumping ground for the cripplingly spectrummy and the obnoxiously rich, which, as much as you may want to be true, isn’t.