'Saltburn': we are all Oliver Quick

Casting can change a script, it's obvious. I keep thinking about that Andreas from One Love “petite” and “utterly local” that ended up being played by the not at all petite and much less supremely local Hovik Keuchkerian. I doubt that the Nat of the novel would have acted the same way towards the attractive Armenian-Lebanese giant.

During the promotion of Saltburn, Jacob Elordi joked with Barry Keoghan about the possibility that Timothée Chalamet had been the first candidate for his role. With him it would have been another film in the category “a stranger comes to a family and disrupts their life”, a subgenre that covers the same thing. Theorem that The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and whose variations are infinite, but with one constant: the stranger is canonically desirable. It would be understandable if the Cattons welcomed Chalamet with—paraphrasing Sofía Vergara, heroine of the week—“arms open and pants down,” but for them to do so with a Keoghan who maintains, let's say, a complicated relationship with beauty, it is the grace of a film that, on the other hand, does not go beyond a Return to Brideshead for fans of Euphoria.

Oliver Quick is not adorned by any gift, he is not a sophisticated seducer, a Ripley or a Frank Abagnale, and his deception is vague and easily detachable because the intention of its creator was not to make a satire on social classes and even less to ridicule the Catton, with whom he shares a lineage, but rather to reflect that viewer who, like Quick, will approach his film dazzled by the 127 rooms of Drayton House. The same one who surrenders fascinated to the realities of millionaires and follows with the curiosity of an entomologist the freeze-dried stocks of Preysler or the Pombo. What Emerald Fennell wants to make clear to them is that they will only be able to access those lives they do not deserve by stepping over their corpses.

You can follow EL PAÍS Television on x or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.

_