Emerald Fennell’s followup to Promising Young Woman is a hollow dramedy that wastes solid performances from Carey Mulligan, Rosamund Pike, and others.

With her first film, Promising Young Woman, writer-director Emerald Fennell took a storyline that was essentially a cloddish-but-glossy retread of such female-driven revenge sagas as Ms .45 and I Spit on Your Grave, infused it with insights regarding gender issues that would barely have passed muster in a 100-level college class and somehow rode it to inexplicable praise and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

With her follow-up project, Saltburn, 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.

Set in 2006, the film opens at Oxford University where awkward scholarship student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) sticks out like a sore thumb amongst his more moneyed classmates. One day, he makes the acquaintance of one of the most confident of the bunch, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who ends up taking Oliver under his wing. This comes much to the consternation of many in his circle, especially his snotty cousin Farleigh (Archie Madweke). When a tragedy leaves Oliver with nowhere to go at the end of the school year, Felix magnanimously offers to have him spend the summer with him and his family at Saltburn, their sprawling ancestral home.

Oliver accepts and soon finds himself meeting the other members of the family, including oddball dad Sir James (Richard E. Grant), ex-model mother Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike), and troubled daughter Venetia (Alison Oliver). There’s also the imperious and ever-present staff, and Elsbeth’s morose friend Pamela (Carey Mulligan), whose only apparent skill is ignoring the glaringly obvious signs that she has long outstayed her welcome.

Although initially out of his element, Oliver gets into the swing of things at Saltburn. It initially seems that he has an unspoken erotic fixation with Felix (which he demonstrates by doing some rude things with Felix’s bathwater), he begins worming his way into the lives of the other Cottons in unsettling ways that eventually culminate in shocking revelations, betrayal, and tragedy — all set against the backdrop of a lavish end-of-summer party. 

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. Even as someone who wasn’t exactly in the tank for Promising Young Woman, I was kind of shocked at times by the flat, undisciplined screenplay this time around. 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. It has the feel of a script that never got the rewrite that it so clearly needed, or an old early work Fennell pulled out of a drawer.

Fennell’s work behind the camera is hardly better. Although she and cinematographer Linus Sandgren manage to conjure up the occasional arresting image, too many of the visual pyrotechnics on display—from presenting the entire film in 4:3 to bathing emotionally fraught moments in red—feel thrown into the mix to get across points the screenplay should have properly conveyed. She also fails to get much of a performance out of Keoghan; he just coasts through the part without any of the electrifying, offbeat energy he’s demonstrated in films like The Killing of a Sacred Deer. His shift from mock-worthy to menacing never feels natural. 

What makes Saltburn especially frustrating is that occasional moments suggest the kind of movie Fennell presumably wanted to make. Every once in a while, an especially tart and darkly funny line will bring the proceedings to life for a few moments. Most of these come from Grant and Pike, both of whom are quite hilarious as Felix’s spectacularly self-absorbed parents; they know how to make the most of their material. They do it so winningly that you want to see them paired up again as soon as possible. Carey Mulligan’s brief turn is just as funny, a pitch-perfect cameo that leaves you wanting more.

Mostly, though, 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.

Saltburn slinks into theaters November 17th.

Saltburn Trailer: