At one point in the new film Saltburn, Rosamund Pike’s aristocratic matriarch, Elspeth Catton, learns of a friend’s death by suicide. Without even a beat to process the news, she says to her family, but also to no one in particular: “She’d do anything for attention.”
It’s a perfect encapsulation of Elspeth, a mother who performs extreme empathy but whose avoidance of actual feeling and compassion has curdled into a poison that she absentmindedly shoots off like darts.
In writer-director Emerald Fennell’s psychosexual thriller, Elspeth embodies the allure of the upper class: an impossibly rich woman made all the more gorgeous by her wealth, who swans around her Versailles-like estate in glamorous dresses with no care other than what to plan for dinner. She also telegraphs that lifestyle’s trap, an imprisonment of luxury that warps her sense of humanity and ability to connect. She’s a rose entirely ignorant of her thorns.
