2026-03-27 03:56:37
The Long Good Friday12 was made in 1979, and you can tell pretty much instantly. The film is grainy, the soundtrack is synthesizer heavy, and it comes from a time when movies were confident enough to let you go for 10 or 15 minutes without having even the slightest clue as to what’s going on.
That’s before you see familiar actors like Pierce Brosnan at his youngest, Kevin McNally at his most wait-is-that-Bill-Hader?-ish, and Paul Freeman at his most beautiful. (It made me remember that one of the off-putting things about Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark was that he was so distractingly handsome).
In any case, the movie starts with several scenes of dialogue-less intrigue: a suitcase full of money! A clandestine hand-off! Two guys sitting in a remote farm house! A gay hook-up in a pub! Murders! British Airways jets! A widow! Architectural plans! A funeral procession that stops to let the widow get out of the car and spit on a guy! Swimming! And that’s all before we even see our first glimpse of our main characters, played by Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.
I’ll admit that I’m just far enough into the MTV generation that I rarely have the attention span required for movies made before 1982. And I did have to pause the movie a few times, both to go out for a cigarette — everybody is smoking constantly in this movie — and to let my brain recalibrate to a style of storytelling in which everything is given time to play out.
The Long Good Friday isn’t what I’d call slow; in fact, it’s sometimes disorienting, as it often jumps to a new scene and forces you to figure out how it fits in with everything else. But even once I was able to make sense (mostly) of all the different accents, it still felt as if I were having to translate between the language of film this movie was using, and the one I’m so used to now.
It wasn’t until the brilliant, iconic, final scene that I could even identify what was different. This isn’t a movie that works in symbols and metaphors. In fact, it feels like the kind of movie that would call me a ponce who took too many cinema studies classes in college for even trying to do so. I could conclude that a scene takes place at a stock car race to show how a story about control and order had suddenly escalated into chaos and mayhem. It’s more likely that it was set at a stock car race because that looked cool and exciting.
It’s not at all a shallow movie, but its complexity comes not from trying to pick it apart for meaning, but from fitting all the disparate pieces of the story together to make sense. Which is exactly what the main character, Harold Shand, spends the entire movie trying to do. Someone is trying to take him down, on the day he’s trying to broker the biggest deal of his life, the deal that might take him from “businessman” and head of a “corporation” to becoming an actual businessman and head of a real corporation. Who’s behind it, and why?
Over the course of the movie, you see him transform from an almost cartoonish version of a Cockney gangster into a real character. There’s a scene near the beginning where he’s addressing the people on his boat as it glides down the Thames, and you see him framed by the Tower Bridge as he gives the kind of puffed-up monologue worthy of Johnny Caspar. By the end of the movie, he doesn’t have to talk. The camera stays fixed on him for minutes, as you see him making sense of his situation and figuring out what exactly he’s going to do next.
It’s all allowed to just play out across his face. That’s possible only because you’ve got an actor like Bob Hoskins playing him, but also because just about every scene that advances the plot and gets closer to figuring out what’s going on, also tells you a little bit about who he is and what he values. Loyalty, trust, respect, honor, order, and to no small degree, London itself. The stereotype of “gangster with a strict code of honor” is pretty familiar, but The Long Good Friday and Hoskins’s performance makes it feel legit. He really believes in it.
He’s typically not the kind of guy who’s about playing the angles or secretly pulling the strings, and when he does try a double-cross, it goes badly. He’s the kind of guy who hangs out with an enforcer named Razors. You can usually tell what’s going on just by looking at his face, and if he looks like he’s about to kill you, that’s because he likely is.
And while the movie is spooling out its plot, it’s giving Harold one opportunity after another to tell you exactly what’s on his mind. The thing that they all have in common is that he’s a traditionalist. He reminisces about his friends, his childhood as a petty crook, the past ten years of peace between warring gangs, the good old days before the illegal narcotics trade, everything that London used to be, everything that England used to be.
There’s one scene I noticed in The Long Good Friday that never seems to be explicitly tied to anything else, and I never caught an explanation or resolution. The camera’s in some kind of underground space, panning silently across an entire grid of yellow containers marked “EXPLOSIVE.” I couldn’t tell if it had been established as part of the construction project, or if it was there just as ominous foreshadowing.
In any case, it along with the final scene were the only two cases of the movie inviting you to do any of your fancy-pants “interpretation of symbols and implicit metaphors.” They suggest that Harold is finally understanding that the world is changing, things are getting too complicated and too dangerous, and coming to terms with the idea that he’s probably not going to be part of whatever comes next.
2026-03-25 06:16:06
There’s one scene in Jurassic Park that I hate. It’s the one where Grant and Sadler first see the dinosaurs free-roaming through a field, and he’s so awestruck that he fumbles with his glasses, and then he reaches around and physically turns her head to take a look at them.
Even back in the 90s, when I was much less cynical and more impressionable, it felt like they had put all of this effort into making dinosaurs that seemed as real as they could possibly make them, and then undercut the whole thing by having humans behave in a way that was cringingly fake. I think it’s a huge part of why I’ve never quite been able to really love that movie as much as everyone else seems to.
And it’s perpetually frustrating, because Steven Spielberg is indisputably the master of fun, accessible, action and sci-fi movies, and an absolute genius at executing on an action sequence. But so many of his best movies are undermined with these moments that just feel saccharine, maudlin, or just full of forced awe and wonder.
So the one thing that impressed me the most about Project Hail Mary was that it delivered on those heart-caught-in-your-throat moments of Spielberg’s best sci-fi — I’m not too proud to admit that it had me on the verge of sobbing at a couple of parts — but without explicitly telling you, this is awesome. You should be in awe of this.
Of course, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have established their own style by this point, which is always threatening to undermine everything. With them, it’s “flippant and quirky,” and especially early on, it feels like it’s always just on the edge of going too far.
Ryan Gosling’s character1 sometimes seems like they were trying to create the male version of a manic pixie dream girl, with his cardigans and his novelty science teacher shirts. As he was digging through his belongings, I was dreading the moment he’d pull out a ukelele. I kept thinking “you’re a grown-ass adult. Either put your glasses on your face or push them on top of your head like a normal person.”
But the intensely annoying thing about Ryan Gosling is that it’s all but impossible for him to be too intensely annoying. He’s just unfairly good at comedy and being relatable for somebody who looks like he does. So before he’s allowed to turn into a caricature of Quirky, Relatable Science Genius Guy, he resolves into an actual character. His whole process of trying to remember who he is — “wait, am I smart?!” — means the audience gets to figure him out as the movie goes on. Instead of, for example, the Michael Crichton approach of introducing an expert to us at the start and leaving the process of making them relatable or human as an exercise to the reader.
There’s one moment in Gosling’s performance that I think is the best example of this. He’s just received a container of something of unknown origin, and we get a short montage of him trying to figure out what it’s made of and how to open it, using Science. The solution turns out to be so simple that it’s corny — because this is a movie unconcerned with being “hard” science fiction, no matter how much it may look like it is — but Grace suddenly realizes he got fixated on the puzzle when he should’ve been trying to open it in a safe environment. He shouts, “oh nooooo!” and runs it over to the standard glass-walled-box-with-built-in-gloves that may or may not actually exist outside of Hollywood; how should I know?
That line delivery is just dead-on perfect. And more than that, it sells everything about his character for the rest of the movie. Smart and capable, but also practical, over-confident, and reckless. More interested in finding the solution than in going through all of the steps to find it the right way. That means the movie can lightly skip over all of the impossibly hard — and boring — parts of a real story about First Contact, and get back to its strengths, which are character development and plot.
I’ve seen a few criticisms of the movie that say its tendency to go for laughs undermines all of the awe and wonder that should be present in this story. But for me, the “awe and wonder” in a story like this has already been over-mined for decades. I was six years old when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out and demanded the audience be struck dumb with awe at the sight of a UFO over Devil’s Tower. That moment is referenced in Project Hail Mary, and it’s already so iconic that they don’t even have to explicitly say what they’re doing; he just hums the tune.
Earlier in the movie, when alarms are going off all over the ship, Grace screams “Shields up!” and the ship’s computer calmly responds that the ship doesn’t have shields. He replies, “Why not?!” The characters, the audience, and the filmmakers have all been steeped in science fiction our whole lives. A movie telling us this is awesome! and demanding that we play along just isn’t going to feel realistic anymore. We need a way in besides spectacle, something that’s going to make us care about the characters and what’s happening to them.
Because I waited too long to get tickets, I had to go several days of hearing people online gushing about how great the movie was, giving it a thumbs-down emoji, or saying “amaze amaze amaze.” So I went in dead-set on not falling into the hype, and I sat there arms crossed, saying, “You’ve got to earn it, movie. Entertain me.”
And it really did. It managed to be charming even after telling me directly how it was trying to charm me. Funny in ways that I hadn’t expected — playing scenes of two spacecraft coming into first contact for laughs instead of awe — but never so much that it felt like it wasn’t taking any of it seriously. Its moving moments and its joyful moments felt completely earned. And despite all of the modern self-awareness of its tone, it still retained that old-fashioned optimism that no matter how bad things get, there’s no problem too big for science and cooperation to fix.
Finally, it’s unrelated, but there’s one detail that I noticed that I have to call out: While he’s trying to remember who he is, Grace keeps a white board list of clues and questions. One of them says “ALWAYS MUSCLES?” And I’m still completely not sure how I feel about it.
On the one hand, I appreciate it as a quiet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acknowledgement that for their schlubby, relatable, Science Genius middle school teacher guy, they’ve cast someone with the physique of Ryan Gosling. But at the same time, this movie never shows off his physique at all, much less to Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America extremes. It’s only because we all had a year of relentless Barbie promotion showing him with his shirt off that we had any idea what was going on underneath the novelty T-shirts and cardigans. So drawing attention to it feels not only unnecessary, but almost rubbing our noses in it?
It’s not a big deal, and definitely didn’t change my overall take on the movie as being pretty great. I’ll just file it away along with Fat Thor as yet another case of Hollywood simply not knowing how to handle its actors being hot without finding a way to make it weird.
2026-03-25 04:01:43
Last week we went to see the House of Kong installation in Los Angeles (which has ended by now), a collaboration between Gorillaz and Meow Wolf that was an interactive celebration/history of the band with a promotion for their new album.
It was pretty neat, although as someone who’s a mid-tier fan of Gorillaz at most, I think it would have had a bigger impact on fans of the band than fans of location-based entertainment. There were a few guys in our group who seemed to recognize everything and were really into it; for me, they had already played the only three songs I know within the first 10 minutes. One of those songs is “19-2000”, and I wish that the superior Soulchild remix version had been the one to get the animated video.1
If it sounds like I’m underselling it, I don’t mean to. It was a pretty ingenious way to not only satisfy fans, but pull newcomers into the elaborate, years-long art project they’ve built up around the music. In particular: at exactly the point where it feels like an overblown hagiography of the band, overstating the depth of its character- and world-building, that’s when the immersive part takes over. It didn’t turn me into a super-fan, but I did think it was a perfectly-balanced combination of promotion/hype-building and interesting experience on its own merits.
(I especially liked my husband’s main take-away, though: “I knew living in London was expensive, but how can you be in Blur and make Tank Girl and still need to share an apartment?”)
Yesterday, I saw Project Hail Mary, which has surprisingly effective music throughout, and uses The Beatles’ “Two of Us” really well. It’s been stuck in my head ever since, because it’s I’m-not-researching-it-but-I’m-99.9%-sure-is by Paul McCartney, who’s cranked out so many unforgettable melodies over his lifetime that even his lesser-known songs2 would be career-defining for other songwriters.
But in my brain it’s always quantum-entangled3 with a song I like even better, which is George Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe.” The opening combination of bass line and honky tonk-sounding piano was unlike anything else I associated with the band, almost as distinct as “Helter Skelter” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” as making me believe these guys could do everything!
I always wondered why “Old Brown Shoe” never seemed to get the same kind of attention and same level of prominence as the band’s other songs. After reading a little bit about it, it sounds like it was mostly yet another case of John Lennon being a jerk.
2026-03-24 16:29:29
The Wretched is the kind of movie you’d stumble onto when channel surfing late at night, watch for a few minutes, and then get engrossed enough to watch until the end. It’s an unrated independent movie with a modest budget1 that feels like it punches above its weight and ends up being pretty fun.
It’s about a teenage boy whose parents are going through a divorce, so he travels to stay with his dad in a small resort town on the water. He deals with teen stuff like having to get a job, trying to make friends with the local kids, having a crush on a co-worker, struggling with the divorce and his dad’s new girlfriend, and also he suspects something evil is going on with the family next door.
I didn’t stumble onto it; I kept hearing the title casually mentioned along with other horror movies, so I finally decided to go in blind without hearing anything else about it.2 The piece of trivia that always gets associated with it is that it beat Avatar‘s record of most weeks at first in the box office… because it was released in 2020, when nobody was releasing movies to theaters. It might have also gotten a slight bump recently because the lead actress is the voice of the main character in Hoppers.
To me, it felt indie but not low budget. The effects and make-up work is pretty good, there are some surprisingly gruesome scares starting with the opening scene, and it’s darker and a little more intense than I would’ve expected. It did feel rough, though, cutting between storylines in a way that was disorienting; I found myself often asking “wait, who’s that person? Whose house are we in now? Is this a different scene?” And it’s entirely a me problem, but a few of the actors look just similar enough that you can get confused if you’re not paying close attention. (Maybe if you’re not trying to do something else while watching it, you won’t fall into the “old man thinks all dark-haired women are the same character” trap).
I liked it overall, but I didn’t think I had anything that interesting to say about it. Until I read reactions online, where a lot of people seemed to be giving their most willfully uninteresting and incurious takes. To explain what I mean requires spoilers after this point.
I read multiple complaints about the movie falling apart at the end, or having “huge plot holes.” And there are indeed some issues with it; in my opinion, the biggest one is having the dad show up at exactly the right place at the right time, even though he’d have no idea where the kids ran off to.
Also, the ending didn’t land as well as I suspect they intended it to. It’s easy to tell what they were going for, but none of the scenes really sold it. It was more of a “well, if you say so,” than an “oh my god!”
But none of that was enough to ruin the movie, because its biggest act 3 reveal — our main character has a younger brother he’d been made to forget! — was pulled off so well. And it’s irritating to be reminded of the internet’s tendency to call it a “plot hole” whenever a movie tries to do something unconventional.
I hadn’t seen it coming at all. And better than that, the quick “we gave you all the clues!” flashbacks worked perfectly. (Especially right after seeing Saltburn, where its flashbacks seemed ham-fisted and unnecessary to me).
So often at the end of a detective story, we get a recap of all the clues we were supposed to have picked up on, and it’s rarely satisfying. Because The Wretched isn’t a detective story, I wasn’t primed to look for clues to some mystery — other than the most immediate one of “what exactly is this thing that’s attacking this family?” — so everything else just felt like a weird non sequitur. Weird enough to stick in my mind, but not so much that I tried to make sense of it at the time.
The woman on the bus saying “you’re quite the artist.” Our protagonist saying “it’s just us.” The dad saying “I love the sound of that.”3 All of it just felt like weird mood-setting for a horror movie.
What’s even cooler, though, is how it’s a case of The Wretched playing with point-of-view and perspective for effect, in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from a movie like this. And I wouldn’t have thought much about it if I hadn’t read a Reddit post complaining about it.
The complaint was that it didn’t make sense unless the witch had cast a spell on our protagonist before the movie had started, but how is that even possible since she couldn’t have gotten the picture until much later, and so on. And sure, if you need a movie to be literal and strictly chronological, it doesn’t make sense. I even tried a thought experiment to see if I could find the point of the “switch,” where we went from seeing his memory of events to seeing the “actual” events. Maybe his premonition of being drowned on the bus? And I could never make it all neatly line up.
But of course, that’s not a “plot hole.” It’s the point. The movie’s structured to make the reveal have the same impact on the audience as it does on the protagonist at that moment.
We never question whether the movie itself is being an unreliable narrator. After all, there’s already enough going on in this movie, with a shape-shifting witch going around mind-controlling men and eating children. So when we see the reveal, we feel the same disorientation that the protagonist does at the idea that we’ve completely forgotten that a person even existed.
It’s a neat trick to think about, because it calls into question all of these hard fast rules of cinematic storytelling that we just take for granted. We assume that we’re either in third person omniscient mode unless we’re shown otherwise. We get clues when the movie’s shifted to a certain character’s point of view. We assume that cuts are going to skip over a reasonable and understandable amount of time and space, and we’re seeing everything chronologically unless told otherwise.
Movies don’t play with that enough. And when they do, it’s usually the entire point of the movie, like Memento, or Shutter Island. I really liked seeing something that would’ve otherwise worked just fine as a straightforward take on Rear Window or Fright Night, decide to throw in a flourish to make the audience feel like they’d been under a spell themselves.
2026-03-23 08:42:34
I didn’t intend to make a double feature yesterday of Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and Saltburn, but they have a few things in common. They’re both about normal people1 trying to exist in a world of clueless over-privileged people. And they both have interpretations that I’d assumed were patently obvious, but apparently weren’t.
After I complained that the plot and ideas in Saltburn were so clearly spelled out that it went beyond frustrating into insulting, I went online looking for an image for the post. And I saw multiple essays with takes on the movie that were so different from mine that it felt as if we’d been watching entirely different movies. The only thing that reassured me that we were in fact talking about the same movie was that they all mentioned drinking spoogey bath water.
Seeing so many different interpretations, even ones that I completely disagree with, gave me a little bit more respect for Saltburn having more ambiguity than I’d given it credit for. And it made me think more about what it means to “get” a movie, specifically the distinction between getting the plot and coming to a conclusion about what it “means.”
It didn’t save the movie for me. I still don’t like the ending, since it presented a series of quick-fire flashbacks to suggest some intricate Kaiser Soze web of deceit that was being spun the whole time and you didn’t even realize! Even though I’d already suspected as much in the first twenty minutes, and had it already confirmed by the halfway point.
It’s possible that I read mention of The Talented Mr Ripley2 without remembering it, and that planted the idea in my head. But by the time Oliver was fingering a young woman he’d just been told had severe self-esteem issues, I thought it was all but explicit. Later, when he’s sexually assaulting the bitchy cousin, it was clear that the masks were off, and the movie had already given away the last of its secrets.
Maybe there was supposed to be an ambiguity as to when exactly Oliver’s machinations started? The idea that his crush/obsession, and his desire to be part of the “in crowd,” had sucked him into this world of careless privilege, and it had corrupted him? If that were the case, then I think the movie would’ve been much stronger had it left all of that ambiguous.
And I think it might’ve avoided the recurring complaint that Saltburn “doesn’t say much of anything,” since spelling out everything at the end reduces it to an empty-feeling thriller with a too-obvious “twist.” Every explanation puts more emphasis on the plot and takes it away from the more interesting part, the characters.
That’s where there’s room for more interesting and different interpretations. I read one essay that saw Felix as an example of everything that’s wrong with the rich elite: completely self-absorbed and thoughtless, presenting himself as a friend while constantly subjecting Oliver to micro-aggressions about being poorer. I think that interpretation is directly contradicted by stuff that happens in the movie, but I also think it’s a good illustration of the ideas the movie plays with: how much of the class divide is the result of what people project onto the rich and beautiful about their own prejudices or insecurities.
Another essay was all about the reveal of Oliver coming from an “upper middle class” background3, turning it into a story about how capitalism and class divides create a situation where people can never have enough. The family in Saltburn never wants for anything, but every person below that level of wealth and privilege is trapped in a society that demands that they always aspire to having more.
I don’t agree with everything in that take, but I do like that it lines up with what I believe is the most interesting thing about Saltburn: it flips the story from a satire about the excessive lifestyle of the idle rich, into a satire about the people who aspire to that lifestyle. We’re so used to seeing the former — even Richard E Grant plays the patriarch of a more cartoonishly evil and fake-compassionate family in Death of a Unicorn — that it’s impossible for some people to read this movie as anything but that. But I think that the one place where the movie does preserve some ambiguity is by leaving it open to interpretation what you think of the Catton family. Do you envy them, hate them, pity them, or some combination of the three?
One thing that’s probably good to keep in mind: when you’re seeing a mainstream Hollywood movie about “regular people,” you should be a little bit suspicious. “Celebrities: They’re Just Like Us!” has been an essential part of movie marketing for at least a century, even though being a recognizable part of a movie automatically bumps you up a tax bracket. No, not everyone working in movies is super-rich, but if you’re doing a press tour, you’re almost certainly living in a sphere of influence (if not wealth) that gives you more in common with the idle rich who are the targets of the satire, not the regular people who are often the protagonists.
I have to wonder if that’s a key element of the personal criticisms of Emerald Fennell’s movies. For an audience that’s been trained that it’s always okay to “punch up,” then being in a social and professional circle that also contains people like Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie might seem like open season to discredit anything you have to say. Especially in a movie like Saltburn, which makes the middle-class guy the villain — or at least anti-hero, based on how much you hate the core family and rich people in general — and leaves some room for sympathy for the core family.
Personally, I take the idea of having sympathy for the Cattons, and interpreting their attempts at kindness as genuine, as kind of a take on the serenity prayer. It doesn’t excuse them or the system that keeps them rich or powerful; it just asks what part of that is something you can control? Dismantling a system vs sticking it to the rich guys are really two separate questions, and ones that are especially relevant now. The part that you actually have immediate control over is simpler: they’re so far out of your sphere that they don’t even think about the lives of regular people in anything but the most abstract terms.
Shaking your tiny fist at them isn’t going to accomplish much of anything, and it certainly won’t ever be seen by them. So what does being envious of them, or hating them, do to you?
That makes it an unintentional double feature with Ready or Not 2, another movie about regular people getting pulled into the world of the cluelessly corrupt rich and powerful.
These movies are not multi-layered or particularly nuanced. Even deliberately so. At the core of both of the Ready or Not movies is the visceral satisfaction of seeing a relatable person4 murdering a bunch of rich assholes.
The bulk of the comedy of the movie comes from the fact that they are so evil, so powerful, and so clueless. Both movies have multiple gags about how these characters are so pampered and yet so ruthless that they’re perfectly willing to murder someone, but have no idea how to actually use the weapons. Ready or Not 2 cleverly sets the tone at the beginning, with David Cronenberg as a ludicrously rich patriarch so powerful that he can instantly stop a ceaseless conflict with a single phone call.
This is a movie where the bad guys are literally murderous, back-stabbing Satan worshippers; it’s simply unconcerned with nuance. But I think that there is an idea at the core of the sequel that keeps it from floating completely away into silly action-horror-comedy.
For their review of Ready or Not 2 on the Breakfast All Day channel, Christy Lemire and Alonso Duralde put their disappointed faces in the thumbnail, which made me assume that they hated it. But watching the review, I actually agreed with most of their points. The sequel doesn’t need to exist, it’s basically just an excuse to make more Ready or Not, and there’s a severe tonal whiplash between scenes brutally beating the hell out of Kathryn Newton’s character being intercut with a slapstick fight between two women in wedding dresses in a different room. I agree with all of that; I just would’ve given it a higher score and put my smiley face in the video review thumbnail.
The point where I disagree, mostly: they called out the scenes between Grace and Faith throughout the movie, rebuilding their relationship from estranged to accusatory to loving, as being another example of that tonal inconsistency. They drag the movie down, it’s the same note repeated over and over, and it seems trite and maudlin for a movie that is otherwise not interested in being either.
I was initially inclined to agree. Especially in the middle, as they keep repeating the same “You abandoned me!” “I had to!” back-and-forth in between action sequences, it felt weird and shallow. Something done more out of obligation than actual effort: look, character development! And especially since the movie goes so hard establishing that these are regular people (they work as a waitress and a hostess, and they came from a foster home), it feels like the filmmakers were afraid they wouldn’t read as relatable enough, even though they’re contrasted against characters so cartoonishly over-privileged that it includes a kid who’s always on his Switch 2 and a guy who’s never seen without a silk bathrobe and a martini.
But I think it’s part of a through-line introduced in the sequel that wasn’t present in the original, and it works in conjunction with a few other moments.
One is the young woman presented as the key rival. She’s from one of the rich houses and was the fiancee of Grace’s husband, before he ditched her, tried to leave his family, and ran off with Grace. She comes in screaming that Grace ruined her life. Grace just responds with “I don’t know who you are!“5
I think it’s a neat twist on how regular Joes vs rich assholes stories typically work, since it’s pretty much always the case — in fiction and in real life — that rich people have so little awareness or consideration for anyone outside their circle that they can absolutely ruin the lives of people they’ve never met. Essentially, as that Mad Men meme says, there’s power in being able to say “I don’t think about you at all.”
Later in the movie, Grace is tempted twice by one of the rich women playing the game. First, she’s told of a secret clause in the game’s rules, where she can be free of the game by marrying into one of the competing families. Faith encourages her to take the deal, but she refuses, eventually explaining that she’d rather die than sell her soul.
Then, after Grace has finally agreed to marry the Supreme Bad Guy Titus in order to save her sister, she’s approached by Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Ursula, who also tries to present herself as a sympathetic ally. She insists that she had no idea just how psychotic Titus was, but by working together, they can control him or at least keep him in check.
It’s kind of Screenwriting 101 to say that Titus and Ursula are presented as a counter-point to Grace and Faith; here’s what a really dysfunctional sibling relationship looks like, and you guys don’t have it nearly that bad. I think it’s a little more interesting that the rich characters are practically incapable of interacting with each other as human beings. The somewhat sympathetic characters in Ready or Not (the brother-in-law and the new husband) were both presented as if they genuinely wanted to get out of the system, but they just lacked the will to actually do it. All of the villains in the sequel are either murderous or trying to find some kind of leverage that gives them more power. They put themselves forward as allies, but only when they have something to gain from it.
Finally, most if not all of the conversations between the sisters are about money as much as family. The main conflict is pretty absurd; no, an 18 year old wouldn’t have been able to take care of a 15 year old, and that practically should have been the end of the argument. But it does emphasize how much the problems of the rich characters are self-created from their own greed, and how many problems just disappear once you have enough money to be comfortable. And here, framed as a question of what you’re willing to give up (your relationship to your family) in order to live comfortably.
Before I go too far making it sound like this is some richly complex and nuanced story, I have to mention that in one scene, Faith says that she saw Grace in a Whole Foods in New York, but didn’t say anything. It’s hard to think of a clearer give-away that a wealthy-enough-not-to-care screenwriter is trying to write about poor people, than describing two struggling young women both shopping in a Whole Foods.6
In any case, I think it all works together to introduce an idea that wasn’t present in the first movie’s more general-purpose “rich people are just the worst” message: how much would you be willing to give up to be super-rich and powerful? Is it worth selling your soul?
Because the Ready or Not movies are both basically clever and stylish cartoons, it’s a question of literally selling your soul. With everything else going on in the sequel, I think that the otherwise-clunky character development between the sisters is part of the through line that makes it figurative as well. Not just rejecting a deal with the devil, because that’s unlikely to happen to most of us. Instead, rejecting all of the ways that envy, greed, and the pursuit of money or power can chip away at your soul in the real world.
Basically, expanding the “I have defeated the rich bastards!” of the first movie into a stronger victory, “I don’t have to even give a damn about the rich bastards, because I have everything I need.”
2026-03-23 01:30:00
Since I liked Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” so much, I was pretty geared up to finally watch Saltburn. Somehow I’ve managed to stay almost completely unspoiled over the last few years, apart from the scene referenced in my title, and that it had Jacob Elordi and Rosamund Pike.
Oh, and also that it was either a bold and absolutely shocking take on English period dramas, or it was an inept and overrated piece of garbage that should haunt its writer and director for the rest of her career. One of those two.
As it turns out, I don’t think either of those are true. It’s not for me, but even as someone completely unfamiliar with the classics that inspired it (I’ve heard Brideshead Revisited mentioned multiple times, along with another title that would be a spoiler even to mention), I could see and appreciate what it was doing. It’s a darkly comic and horny take on stories about the British aristocracy, and people of lower classes longing for that life of wealth and privilege even after seeing all of its gross excesses.
In fact, that’s probably the biggest reason I didn’t like the movie: I could see what it was doing after about an hour in, but then I saw that there was still well over an hour to go. And even once the movie had explicitly established what it was doing, it just kept going on piling on one more ending after another, as if it were Return of the King or something.
Even after all that, I was eager to give it a begrudging pass, but then it added yet another ending that explicitly spelled out everything that I’d thought had been abundantly clear already. It’s one thing to overstay your welcome; it’s worse when you spend the entire time saying, “Get it? Did you see what we did? No, seriously, did you get it?”
It’s too bad, because there were plenty of elements that I thought were clever and perfectly under-played. Anything with Rosamund Pike’s character, to start with. She’s got the more obvious comedic moments, like when she casually confides that she was a lesbian for a while, but it was “too wet.”
But more than that, the character and the performance were perfectly in sync, suggesting layers to a shallow person that might’ve otherwise come across as a cartoon. There’s a real sense of tragedy and even sympathy to her character, someone who’s not evil and not necessarily good, but has simply lived in a kind of Plato’s cave of privilege her entire life, both because of her wealth and presumably, her beauty. It’s not that she lacks sympathy for less advantaged people; it’s just such an alien concept to her that she can’t even relate.
There’s a similar kind of sympathetic nuance with Jacob Elordi’s character Felix. Everyone projects onto him — not just Oliver, but everyone — a version of who he must be, because of his wealth and his looks. That means that everyone, including the audience, projects their own insecurities and desires onto him as well. People are eager, desperate, to be inside his “light,” but also afraid of when they’re inevitably going to be discarded or cast outside of it.
So there are hints throughout that he’s careless and thoughtless, putting all of his attention onto a person before growing bored and moving onto someone else. We in the audience are waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everything to fall apart. All without considering that these hints are all coming from unreliable people, and seem to be more about their insecurities over falling out of favor with Felix, more than anything about Felix himself.
And there’s another interesting angle to that, which I thought was described really well by Daniel Kibblesmith: “hot people [are] usually pretty nice to you because most of their daily interactions go well.” The cliche of the cruel and stuck-up hot person rarely lines up with reality, because in reality, hot people rarely have any need to be cruel. It’s just that people’s insecurities cause indifference to be interpreted as cruelty.
So we spend a lot of the first part of the movie wondering why a character like Felix seemed to be showing such outsized kindness to Oliver, and constantly questioning whether their friendship was genuine.
There are interesting ideas about class, wealth, and privilege inside Saltburn, and especially how much has changed and how much has stayed the same into the modern era, where the aristocracy is largely vestigial and the lines between classes are blurrier. And the movie does interesting things with those ideas, in a way that I haven’t seen before, using a classic and familiar story format to raise questions about how much of class structure is imposed on us vs how much we insist on imposing on ourselves.
I just think that it’s got maybe ninety minutes worth of those ideas stretched out over two hours, and I wish it had been less languid in its pacing, and more confident that the audience was going to be able to understand exactly what was happening.