So purely by coincidence (I picked the movies without knowing anything about them other than that I had added them to my Letterboxd watchlist at some point in the past) we did a Barry Keoghan two-fer recently. And what’s startling is that he doesn’t quite play the same character in both movies, but he is always an unsettling, vaguely creepy weirdo, which is also true for the first movie I saw him in, Eternals, where he notably played Druig in the same register.

Anyway, though, Saltburn is an Emerald Fennell movie about a British university, which means it’s about class in multiple senses. (Although it took me a minute to realize this: When everyone is snubbing Keoghan’s character at first, I assumed it was just because he was obviously unpleasant and creepy and weird, didn’t occur to me it was because he was lower class until the movie called it out.)

The basic shape of it is that through various encounters, poor Barry ends up friends with a handsome, athletic aristocrat, who invites him to his estate for the summer. The estate is sprawling and gigantic and opulent, and the aristocratic family is… I guess “decadent” is a good word. They seem isolated and out-of-touch with the normal world, like they’re trying to be decent people but they no longer remember quite how that works. Where it goes from there is a spoiler, but I suppose it’s just giving away genre to tell you that it gets disturbing and more than slightly weird before it’s all over.

In this, it’s a perfect pairing to The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a Yorgos Lanthimos movie. If you’ve ever seen one of his films, you’ll know that shit’s going to be weird, and you won’t be disappointed.

Keoghan here plays a teen boy who Colin Farrell is secretly meeting up with for unclear reasons. “Adult man is secretly meeting a teen boy, and giving him expensive gifts” pretty much never has anything good lurking behind it, and so it’s probably again not a spoiler to say that this movie gets disturbing and more than slightly weird before it’s all over, too.

(One thing that stood out to me here, though, is that everyone is speaking in a totally flat and emotionless affect. I kept trying to decide if there was in-story character significance to that, or if it’s purely a stylistic thing that Lanthimos did to make it all seem just a little creepier and weirder, and think I land on the second with low confidence. It’s certainly effective for the purpose, if so.)

I can’t say that either of these movies is “recommended,” exactly, because I think they’re both more than slightly fucked-up and you really would only want to watch them if that’s what you’re in the mood for. But they’re both reasonably good (though Saltburn is, I think, the better one, so if you’re only in the mood for one of these, make it that one).