Saltburn

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeWhen Emerald Fennell let loose on the world her directorial debut, 2020’s Promising Young Woman, the reaction to it quickly turned into an all-out brawl. A woman fakes intoxication in order to trap and confront predatory men, and is drawn into a dead-end act of revenge against the man who sexually assaulted her best friend. Was this a feminist triumph? Or a betrayal of those same…

Rosamund Pike is jolly when she appears on my laptop screen in a cream-coloured blouse, with a cream jacket draped around her shoulders. Vanilla hair only adds to the suggestion of dessert. It is early evening, and the actor is calling from Prague, where she lives with her partner and their two sons. (She was filming the Amazon fantasy series The Wheel of Time there, and stayed put when the pandemic hit.) Is the wood-panelled opulence behind her real or virtual? “It’s a real hotel,” she protests, then starts brandishing…

A lovely supporting turn from Rosamund Pike – and a raucous cameo from Carey Mulligan – are the main reasons to like the opening movie of the London film festival: the new film from Emerald Fennell, whose fierce 2020 debut Promising Young Woman won her a screenplay Oscar.Saltburn is an English mystery drama of the high-cheekboned upper classes, watchable but sometimes weirdly overheated and grandiose, with some secondhand posh-effect stylings, a movie derived from Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, with a bit of…