Saltburn is an Anti-Scouse Film

It’s the end of 2023. We’re in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, wealth and regional inequalities in the UK are at an all-time high, and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn comes to Amazon Prime.

A kaleidoscopic haze of rosy colours, Saltburn is a thriller allegorising class through the characters of Merseyside-born Oliver and upper class Felix. Meeting at the warmly lit and lovingly portrayed landscape of Oxford University, these two characters represent class desire, class conflict, and class inequity – as seen through the eyes of a director looking back with nostalgia at her own university years.

Distinguished immediately by his scouse-adjacent accent, Oliver is a representative of the measly 1.1% of pupils from the West Midlands, North West or Yorkshire and the Humber that attend Oxbridge each year. In this directorial pursuit, Fennel slips off her red-bottomed shoes and imagines what the middle class must desire, so painfully, so violently, when they look up at her and her upper class peers. And doing so, speaks the words she thinks might come out of Northern lips.

Oliver tells us of his disadvantaged background, a story that upon first watch sounded very much like my own. I grew up in social housing in Liverpool, a child carer experiencing countless traumas acting as the first responder to my schizophrenic parent, facing medical neglect thanks to the lack of access to mental health support in the city. Oliver’s commitment to his studies as a means of survival resonates with me as an adult. I still throw myself into productivity to run away from the crisis at home. Even Oliver’s confession to Felix that ‘home’ doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to others was like a transcript of the conversations I’d have with uni friends each year when they asked why I didn’t go back for the summer holidays. I had to answer with the truth – that home for me was a traumatic, abusive, unsafe environment. An environment formed by lack of access due to where I was born: Merseyside.

This is a story I’ve always longed to see represented: how austerity has stolen lives, with all the regional medical neglect, and generational trauma it inflicts on display. Just hearing (even an attempt at) an accent that sounds like my own is a rare, exciting thing. Something that you never hear on adverts, or in video games, or from a main character in a box office film. The characterisation of Oliver introduced at the start of the film holds potential to embody a class story that’s complicated, one that doesn’t restrict itself to the outdated three tier class system of working, upper, and middle. It could reflect the systemic and geographical inequity, sociopolitical conflict that shapes our access to a future, and show the lived realities of people who grow up in modern poverty.

My house was dirty growing up. It was a hoarder’s house, and Oliver speaking words that I only recently found the courage to articulate could have sent a message to many underprivileged young people out there that they are not alone in the isolation of hidden hardships. But instead, it’s a deceitful lie. A self-victimising lie created by Oliver for financial gain. Like the age-old prejudice that people on benefits aren’t even disabled, aren’t even poor, and get boob jobs with all the money they hoard, Fennell invents her own reality. She speaks over so many who never get a chance to be heard. It’s a lie that discredits and throws away the real stories of the astonishing young people who grow up in unspeakable circumstances and fight their way to the table. All of this stings more coming from Fennel’s personal affluence.

Oliver’s character slips away from any nuanced representation of those navigating their individual class stories in places like Prescot, and instead reaffirms stereotypes that follow people from Merseyside around like a shadow. Self-victimising. A liar. Aggressive. Violent. Stealing from the dead and the dying. All words used to portray Liverpool after Hillsborough, all words that represent Oliver’s ‘true self’ in the film. The real horror was seeing a potential flicker of representation be blown out by a selfish desire to discard difficult conversations in favour of sexualising a stereotypical, Blairite, middle class yearning for riches – scenes of hoarded wealth scored to soundtracks that wealthy mansion-dwelling teenagers could dance to on TikTok. The cultural response to this film alone is a sign of its failure of upper class critique.

Other people feel differently. Some feel the film was fabulously accurate, laughing at the upper class and their silly perceptions of the North. One scene in particular has people celebrating its satirical wit on socials through lip-syncing the highly quotable: “They probably don’t have rehab in Liverpool. No, gosh no. No, I can’t imagine they do. No, see, everyone just goes to ruin.” These words are meant to represent a lack of understanding, an imagined depravity that doesn’t really exist. How ironic that this satire is the most accurate bit of class commentary in the whole film. People in Liverpool with severe mental illness, including addiction, live on average 20 years less than elsewhere in the UK. But instead, audiences everywhere now perceive a lack of access to rehabilitation spaces in Liverpool as an out of touch comment imagined up by the whimsical brains of the upper echelons. The absurdity obscures the reality. The impact of this misrepresentation, and a failure to make any comment in the film about the reality of the mental health crisis and drug related violence in Merseyside aren’t even Fennel’s own reflections. When asked about the line, Fennel said “The stuff about rehab in Liverpool, that was all Rosmund and Carey [Mulligan]. [Laughs.]”

Emerald Fennel was not the person to make a film that speaks to the class story of Merseyside, that alone is revealed by the film’s big twist. All of Oliver’s backstory was a lie! In fact, he lives in a semi-detached house! He must have never even seen a working-class person before.

What is missed is the fact that Oliver, by virtue of growing up in Prescot, spent his life in Knowsley – the borough ranked with the second highest levels of deprivation nationally. The fact that people who live in semi-detached houses can be drug addicts, the fact that financial issues are not just black and white – but complex shades made up of socio-economic circumstance – are impossibilities in the rose-tinted picture of class Fennell wants to paint. But because Oliver’s parents aren’t wearing trackies and can cook a spag bol, he’s firmly middle class and squeaky clean. He’s never heard: “Don’t leave your car around him or it will end up on bricks!”

This is not a class-conscious film, it’s a self-gratifying daydream painted in pretty colours and scored in fun sounds. Fennel might be able to give herself a gratifying pat on the back for making one or two light-hearted jokes about the emotional coldness of the upper class, but that is ultimately all she can muster. When the divide between the haves and have nots has never been higher, that’s all Saltburn can offer those of us without: a couple of jokes.