Film

Saltburn

Name: Saltburn
Genre: Drama, Comedy, Thriller
Released: 2023
Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver

A gorgeous, sun-bleached nightmare about class envy dressed as a coming-of-age drama. Barry Keoghan's Oliver worms his way into a country pile full of beautiful, careless rich people, and the film lets its own seductive visuals do the lying for it. Funny, grotesque, and increasingly deranged — best watched knowing as little as possible.

TMDb rating

6.9

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The Talented Mr. Ripley1999

The blueprint. An outsider charms his way into wealth and beauty he can't otherwise access, and the film makes you complicit in wanting him to get away with it.

But More restrained and melancholic than Saltburn — the seduction is quieter, the violence more painful than pleasurable.

Parasite2019

Class infiltration done with surgical control — a family insinuates itself into a rich household's life, and the tone swings from comedy to horror without ever losing its grip.

But Sharper and angrier than Saltburn's woozy decadence; this one has real moral fury underneath the plotting.

Brideshead Revisited1981

Oxford, obsession, and a crumbling aristocratic estate — the original account of a middle-class boy falling in love with a beautiful family's whole way of being.

But Eleven hours of unhurried, elegiac television; it aches rather than smirks, and asks for real patience.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Servant1963

Saltburn's entire engine — an outsider infiltrating a household and quietly swapping places with its master — is lifted almost wholesale from this film's cold, precise template.

A manservant slowly, silently reverses the power balance with his aristocratic employer in this cold, brilliant Losey-Pinter collaboration — the original class-inversion horror story, six decades early.

But Black-and-white, stagey, and deliberately airless; nothing like Saltburn's sun-drenched sensuality — this is claustrophobic and clinical.

Cruel Intentions1999

Rich, bored, beautiful teenagers playing sadistic games with each other's hearts — glossy, cynical, and gleefully nasty in exactly the register Saltburn is chasing.

But Broader and more melodramatic, with none of Saltburn's arthouse restraint — this one wears its trash proudly.

The Riot Club2014no page yet

Oxford's aristocracy at its most feral — entitled young men destroying a room and a life for sport, with the class contempt Saltburn only hints at made explicit.

But Nastier and less stylish; there's little of Saltburn's seductive visual pleasure to soften the ugliness.

Match Point2005

An outsider marries into old money and finds the good life comes with a cost he wasn't expecting to pay — Woody Allen's coolest, cruellest film.

But Talkier and more procedural in its dread; the class satire is subtler and the pace slower.

Knives Out2019

A rich family's rot exposed room by room, with a puzzle-box mystery keeping things brisk and a real appetite for skewering inherited wealth.

But Warmer and far less menacing — this one wants you laughing and rooting for someone, not squirming.

A Simple Favor2018

A glossy, unhinged thriller about envy, obsession and the fantasy of another woman's perfect life, tipping constantly between high camp and genuine menace.

But Sillier and more plot-twisty than Saltburn; it's playing for laughs more than dread.

Promising Young Woman2020

Candy-coloured surfaces hiding something vicious — a film that weaponises its own prettiness the way Saltburn weaponises its estate and its beautiful cast.

But Angrier and more purposeful; the tonal whiplash is deliberate rather than ambiguous, and less playful.

Grey Gardens1976

Saltburn's camera loves decayed grandeur and eccentric old money as spectacle; this is the real, unstaged version of that gaze, and it's far sadder for being true.

A documentary about two once-grand, now-decaying aristocratic women rattling around a rotting mansion, filmed with an intimacy that feels almost indecent to watch.

But No plot, no villain, no catharsis — just real people in real decline, which is a very different kind of discomfort.

Wild Things1998

Same scheming-outsider-among-the-rich DNA as Saltburn, minus every ounce of prestige polish — proof the story works just as well as pure trash.

A trashy, twisty Florida noir about privileged teenagers, a con artist outsider, and a plot that keeps rewriting who's manipulating whom right up to the last scene.

But Genuinely lurid, cheaply plotted, and shameless about it — there's no arthouse gloss to make the sleaze feel respectable.