In Saltburn, writer-director Emerald Fennell has elected to tackle similar issues of class as Evelyn Waugh and Patricia Highsmith, but the results are the same as her last. It’s a puerile, idiotic dark comedy/drama that squanders a few good performances and the occasional line of spiky dialogue on a story that’s never as shocking or incisive as it wishes it was. The idea of giving Brideshead Revisited a modern-day spin and then plunking an increasingly Tom Ripley-like character into the middle of it all is not without its appeal, I suppose. But Fennell doesn’t seem to have a particularly coherent notion of what she wants to do with such a conceit. It takes forever to set up the story and get Oliver and Felix to Saltburn, and the subsequent twists and turns of the plot are mostly ineffectual. The final scenes feel like they’re going on forever and overly rushed at the same time. Saltburn is a tedious eat-the-rich narrative that will unite members of the entire socio-economic spectrum in boredom. It doesn’t even have the dignity of the kind of audacious mess that some filmmakers come up with in their sophomore films.