Reece Shearsmith – Movie Musings

Dreadfully pleased with itself and full of shallow insights and stunt clickbait moments

Director: Emerald Fennell

Cast: Barry Keoghan (Oliver Quick), Jacob Elordi (Felix Catton), Rosamund Pike (Lady Elspeth Catton), Richard E Grant (Sir James Catton), Alison Oliver (Venetia Catton), Archie Madekwe (Farleigh Stuart), Carey Mulligan (“Poor Dear” Pamela), Paul Rhys (Duncan), Ewan Mitchell (Michael Gavey), Sadie Soverell (Annabel), Reece Shearsmith (Professor Ware), Dorothy Atkinson (Paula Quick)

Promising Young Woman was a thought-provoking, very accomplished debut. It’s odd that Emerald Fennell’s sophomore effort plays more like a first film: try-hard, style-over-substance, very pleased with itself and its punky attempts to shock. Crammed full of moments designed to be snipped out and talked about – in a “you will not fuckin’ believe what just happened” way – Saltburn is a fairly trivial remix of ideas much, much better explored elsewhere, predictable from its opening minutes.

It’s 2006 and Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a scholarship student at Oxford University, socially awkward and very conscious of his Liverpudlian roots, struggling to fit in among the wealthy set that dominates his college. At the centre is Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), fundamentally decent but blithely unaware of his privilege, who takes a shine to Oliver with his shyness, troubled working-class background and grief at the recent death of his alcoholic father. Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer at Saltburn, his luxurious family seat. There Oliver is welcomed – or does he inveigle his way? – into the lives of the Cattons, from seducing Felix’s sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) to charming his parents Sir James (Richard E Grant) and Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike). But is Oliver all he appears to be?

The answer, of course, is no. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has ever really encountered any form of unreliable narrator before. Fennell opens the film with a clearly older, well-dressed Oliver recounting the film’s story to an unseen person. It’s not much of a deduction from this alone, that Oliver is at best not to be trusted, is definitely potentially dangerous and is probably a lot worse. All that, inevitably plays out, in a film that so nakedly rips off Brideshead Revisited (or Recycled) and The Talented Mr Ripley that Oliver might as well be called Ripley Ryder.

“Ryder” would at least have been a witty name for a character who spends most of the film putting his (apparently) well developed manhood to effective use in manipulating and controlling people. Saltburn assembles a series of “shocking” moments of sexual weirdness from stalker-like sociopath Oliver – so much so, that the moments he merely wanders (or dances) around in the buff feel almost normal. Surely there was more than half an eye on hashtags when the film presents scenes like Oliver drinking spunky bathwater, performing oral sex on a woman during her period or dry humping then wanking over a grave. It’s not big and it’s not clever.

“Not clever” also sums up the film’s inane social commentary. Set in 2006, it seems to take place in a version of Oxford that probably hasn’t existed since 1956. Having been in a state-school kid at Oxbridge at this time, its vision of a university 98% populated by poshos jeering at working-class kids with the wrong sort of tux just isn’t true (in fact there were more state school students than private school kids at Oxford that year). In this fantasy, all the students are either from Old Etonians or maladjusted weirdos from state schools. It’s hard not to think this is Emerald Fennell (a woman so posh, her 18^th birthday party was featured in Tatler) guiltily looking back at how her “set” at Oxford might have behaved to the less privileged students.

It boils down to a view of Oxford as an elitist social club laughing openly at anyone who can’t trace their descendants back to the House of Lords, where tutors are entranced by the idea that a place like “Liverpool” exists and snort at the working class student for being a clumsy try-hard by actually reading the books on the reading list with student life flying by in a series of hedonistic raves, hosted by the rich and famous. Maybe I was just in the wrong circles back in the day.

This portrait of Oxford as a play pen for the super elite is as damaging (it’s exactly the sort of false image that stops deserving people from wanting to go) as it is lazy, tired and false. But then, Saltburn compounds its boringly seen-it-all-before social commentary by trudging off down other, all-too-familiar paths as it turns its fire on those with their nose pressed up against the window of privilege. The film’s vilest member of the elite, Farleigh, is himself an interloper, turned aggressive gate-keeper. And, as is not a surprise, Oliver’s roots turn out to be far more comfortable than he is letting on. Oliver is a Charles Ryder who yearns for Brideshead so much, he starts destroying the Marchmain family to get it. Because, in his eyes, as an aspirant middle-class type he appreciates it more.

On top of this is layered a clumsy, Ripley-esque madness to Oliver, who can’t decide himself whether he is infatuated with the charming Felix (very well, and sympathetically, played by Jacob Elordi) or just wants to suck his soul dry. Barry Keoghan plays this Highsmith-styled sociopath with just enough flash and sexual confusion – and he does manage to successfully turn on a sixpence from wide-eyed wonder, to vicious anger. But the character again feels like a remix of something done better elsewhere, trading emotional depth for cartoonish bombast and clumsy on-the-nose point scoring.

The on-the-nose-ness runs through the whole film. It’s a film screaming to be taken seriously, from its 4:3 framing, to its jarringly satirical music choices, arty Gothic fonts, visual quotes from Kubrick and look-at-me love of tricksy camera shots (some of these, I will admit, are gorgeously done, even if the film frequently lingers on them so we can “see the work”). But it makes very little sense. How does Oliver manage to exert an influence, so profound and complete, over Felix’s parents? Why does the wool fall from everyone’s eyes one-at-a-time in quick succession? Does Saltburn feel sorry for the generous but emotionally dysfunctional Cattons or does it feel they deserve their fate?

Because so many of these ideas are so half-heartedly explored, it becomes a collection of scenes designed to shock, tricksy directorial decisions, some flashy performances (Rosamund Pike can certainly wittily deliver a slew of lines dripping with blithely unaware privilege) and twists that will only surprise those who have never seen a story about an outsider before. Jacob Elordi emerges best, creating a character of surprisingly revealed emotional depth, but most of the rest of Saltburn settles for flash and instant gratification. To use its own terms of reference, it’s as satisfying as premature ejaculation: fun for an all-too-brief second, then a crushing, shameful disappointment.

Smug, semi-spoof murder mystery which can’t decide whether it loves or scorns the genre

Director: Tom George

Cast: Sam Rockwell (Inspector Stoppard), Saoirse Ronan (Constable Stalker), Adrien Brody (Leo Köpernick), Ruth Wilson (Petula Spencer), Reece Shearsmith (John Woolf), Harris Dickinson (Richard Attenborough), David Oyelowo (Mervyn Crocker-Harris), Charlie Cooper (Dennis), Shirley Henderson (Agatha Christie), Pippa Bennett-Warner (Ann Saville), Pearl Chandra (Selia Sim), Paul Chahidi (Fellowes), Sian Clifford (Edana Romney), Lucian Msamati (Max Mallowan), Tim Key (Commissioner Harrold Scott), Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (Gio)

It’s the 100^th performance of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (“how much longer can it run”, the characters ask. If only they knew…) and producers are in talks for a big movie adaptation. At the party, boorish American film director Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody) offends absolutely everyone – and promptly gets murdered. Not only are the cast (including Richard Attenborough – wittily impersonated by Harris Dickinson) suspect, but also the film producers which, contractually, can only go into production when the play closes. Investigating: dishevelled Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and his super enthusiastic sidekick Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan).

See How They Run desperately wants to be a witty commentary on Agatha Christie style locked-room mysteries. It even opens with a voiceover from Brody’s Köpernick, full of scorn for the medium and its cliches before revealing, as per form, that as the least sympathetic character he himself is about to be knocked off. To be fair, there are one or two decent jokes. But the presence of Reece Shearsmith just made me think: Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s anthology dramady Inside No. 9 would have pulled off the same idea, but with far more wit and better understanding of Christie, in half an hour. And certainly with better jokes.

Instead See How They Run feels like it has only the most superficial understanding of Christie, based more on watching a few scenes of Poirot rather than reading the books. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out made a wittier, smarter and more enlightening commentary on Christie in its updating of the form, than this comedy ever manages. It’s never quite clear whether the makers want this to be a genuine Christie-style mystery or an inversion. Stoppard and Stalker go about their investigation in a traditional manner. The suspects all have motives of a sort. There is a definite mystery.

But it’s all lightweight and uninformed. Christie tropes are nudged and then ignored, as if the writers don’t understand them. What better opportunity could you have for Christie’s love for one mysterious character in the story turning out to be an actor in the group in disguise (invariably summarised by Poirot as “the performance of his/her life!”). There actually is a mysterious character here – but it turns out to be another person. Christie tropes around red herrings, secondary crimes, poison – all of them go unexplored.

The film ends with a deliberately counter-intuitive action sequence: but it’s not clear to me why. It’s neither particularly funny, nor does it feel like it has anything to say about the form other than offering an ending we might not expect. There is a nudge on the fourth wall (it’s the ending Köpernick wants) but what point is being made here? Is the action ending endorsing Köpernick’s belief that Christie-style mysteries are formulaic or boring, or is the shoot-out meant to look excessive and ridiculous? Is it implying everything we are watching is Köpernick’s dying fantasy? Is it a gag? I have no idea at all, and that sums up this tonal mess.

It’s a film that wants to have its cake and eat it. It tries to present a genuine murder mystery – and to be fair, when it does this, it does make for a good guessing game – but also wants to take potshots at the genre. It ends up doing neither particularly successfully. And there’s something a bit unlikeable about a film that wants to feed off the audience’s love of a Golden Age detective mystery, but also kinda wants to tell you how the thing you like is actually a bit stupid – and by extension so are you.

Its humour all too often feels a little studenty and obvious – the naming of Rockwell’s character as Stoppard being a case in point (although it does make for one good gag when Pearl Chandra’s charming Shelia Sim denounces another character as “a real hound, inspector”). It eventually feels like a rather smug film, which just goes to show how hard it is to make a Christie-style mystery.

If there is a decent joke in the thing, it’s that it manages to build a film where the plot of The Mousetrap is vital to the outcome, without ever revealing anything about what happens in The Mousetrap. (Presumably, the Christie estate would have had their guts for garters if they did.) Any moment where it looks like we might learn a major event in the play, a character interrupts or someone says “I already know”. These narrative gymnastics are the most inventive thing about it.

The other thing it’s got going for it is a performance of immense charm and comic likeability from Saoirse Ronan, who has rarely been as sweet, bubbly and adorkable as she is here. Ronan’s comic timing is excellent, and Stalker’s mixture of dogged determination and chronic over-enthusiasm provides virtually all the film’s highlights. Rockwell ambles through a (perhaps deliberately) under-written role, but most of the rest of the excellent cast feel under-utilised. Who casts Shearsmith and gives him not a single joke? Sian Clifford to deliver about three lines? David Oyelowo and Ruth Wilson do a lot with very little, but it’s telling that the final act appearance of Lucian Msamati and Paul Chahidi as a master-and-servant double act provides almost as much humour as the rest of the cast put together.

See How They Run passes the time – but that’s really about that. It doesn’t really have anything smart or funny to say about murder mysteries and it never offers anything truly unique or striking to justify itself (other than Ronan’s lovely performance). It’s straining as hard as it possibly can to ape the Coens or (most of all) the quirk of Wes Anderson, but totally lacks the skill and finesse of either. It feels like a film commissioned off the back of Knives Out success: but to be honest if you want to see something that brilliantly riffs off Christie while also being a bloody good mystery, just watch that instead.