A bit of privacy at the cinema isn't too much to ask for, is it, especially when you've gone to the trouble of turning up for the 11am showing on a Monday morning. And yet there I was minding my own business and waiting for the film when no fewer than three other people walked in, intent on sharing a 196-seat auditorium with me. So it goes, so it goes. Actually, the current crisis in cinema being what it is, four people in a screening isn't that unusual – the kind of screenings I go to, anyway – so perhaps one should just be grateful for any signs of people going to the pictures.

The film we were all there to see was Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. Fennell, while possessing a name which may put you in mind of the herbal goods section of your local health food shop, has quietly been putting together a rather impressive CV over the last few years: Emmy-winning showrunner of Killing Eve for a year, Oscar-nominated writer and director of Promising Young Woman, and SAG award-winning member of the cast of The Crown (though, let's face it, her turn as Camilla has probably nuked her chances of getting anything higher than an MBE for the next couple of decades at least). Saltburn is her second film as writer-producer-director and is a rather slippery fish that leaves an odd taste in the mouth.

It starts off looking like a bit of a nostalgia piece set in the late 2000s (something about that combination of words just makes my heart sink a bit, I fear) with northern lad Oliver (Barry Keoghan) arriving at Oxford University and almost immediately failing to fit in with all the monied and stylish scions of the right sorts of families who make up the bulk of the fresher intake. A tough few months ensue, deftly evoked by Fennell (perhaps a bit too deftly, for it brought back memories from my own younger years I could happily have done without having raked up – not that I studied at Oxford, I should make clear).

Things turn around for Oliver when he befriends Felix (Jacob Elordi), a handsome and popular student at his college – even if he still doesn't quite manage to fit in, people are less inclined to mock him for it. Still, he's visibly having a tough time, and so rather than see him go back home to the challenging domestic situation he has described, Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer with him on his wealthy family's sprawling estate, Saltburn.

Here Oliver gets to know Felix's parents (Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant), his sister (Alison Oliver), and various other hangers-on and members of the family, and a blissful summer surrounded by dripping luxury seems to be on the cards – but can Oliver ever really belong in a place like this. . . ?

Saltburn has turned out to be one of those rather divisive films which occasionally happen along – it does seem like most people like it, and some people like it a very great deal, but those people who don't like it really don't like it at all – words like 'botched', 'stupid' and 'gratuitous' turn up when they are talking about the movie.

Well. . . I did um and aah about seeing this one for a couple of weeks, to be honest, mainly because it did look like a superficial piece of pretentious gloss without much substance to give ballast to its ambitions. But we've been short of substantial releases lately because of the SAG strike, and as you may have noticed I'll give most things a chance. So along I went and to be honest – well, I didn't loathe the film, but I can see why choices that fans of it would call provocative might just seem like tacky attempts to shock to someone less impressed by its aesthetic styling. There is a much-discussed naked dance routine near the end of the film; a bit earlier someone performs a sex act while writhing atop a fresh grave; yet another sex scene may strike many viewers as being genuinely revolting.

I suppose one reason for all of these things is to put some viscerality into a film which might easily seem to be a rather abstract piece of social commentary or satire – it's obviously about the British class system to a great extent, but also touches upon notions such as poverty tourism and (briefly) race.

The problem is it does so in what initially seems like a rather scattershot way, never really completing a thought or idea before moving on to something else. The tone is uncertain in places, too – Felix's family come across as caricatures with only the vaguest of ideas about the world beyond their estate, but on the other hand they do get some outrageously good lines ('She'll do anything to get attention,' sniffs Felix's mum on learning a family acquaintance has committed suicide). The film keeps falling back on big, lurid set pieces and smaller, more lurid scenes of intimacy just to hold together. I found myself wondering what it was supposed to be about, and had just about settled on the idea of finding a place where you feel you belong, when. . .

Well, Saltburn does turn out to be about something, but something possibly less interesting. The problem is that I can't really talk about it, as this would probably constitute spoilers for the final third of the movie. Suffice to say it does turn out to be less interesting and ambiguous than it initially looks like it's going to be; the film turns out to share narrative DNA with some quite notable films from the past. (It also put me in mind of the very obscure Oliver Reed movie Blue Blood, if everyone making that film had been taking Ecstasy.)

Most of the performances are very good; Fennell's direction is probably more accomplished than her scripting. It's certainly a distinctive piece of work and it will be interesting to see if it attracts much interest in awards season, especially from American gong-givers who tend to be fascinated by stories about posh British families. Personally I thought Saltburn was probably north of okay, though it tried my patience a bit, and in the end it wasn't quite as interesting as it promised to be. But a distinctive film made by talented people.

Awix

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