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The man sitting next to me at the Chicago Film Festival can only have seen about a quarter of the film. For the rest of the two hours, his hands were covering his eyes \u2013 and it wasn\u2019t hard to see why. Having scored a notable hit with her directorial debut Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan \u2013 for which she won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar \u2013 Emerald Fennell has upped the ante with her latest offering. For Saltburn is a film sure to provoke controversy.<\/p>\n
Set in 2006, it tells the tale of glamorous, effortlessly entitled Felix Catton, who takes fellow Oxford undergraduate, the provincial Oliver Quick, under his gilded wing before inviting him for a never-to-be-forgotten summer at his family\u2019s sprawling estate, the aforementioned Saltburn (in reality, the Grade l listed Drayton House in Northamptonshire).<\/p>\n
So far, so Brideshead Revisited, with a liberal sprinkling of The Go-Between. But Evelyn Waugh and L P Hartley, as well as Patricia Highsmith, whose Talented Mr Ripley the new film also echoes, were models of rectitude compared with the fevered imagination of Emerald.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to make a Gothic movie,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve always been obsessed with Dracula and dark doings in an English country house that nobody ever recovers from. I wanted to make an Agatha Christie murder mystery shot through with sex. So\u2026 all of that went into the cauldron to produce this utterly irrational, sort of vampire movie.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can say that again. There are three scenes in particular that are simply impossible to describe in a family newspaper.<\/p>\n
Suffice to say that Oliver, brilliantly played by BAFTA-award-winning Barry Keoghan of The Banshees of Inisherin fame, slowly insinuates himself into the affections of the Catton family while indulging in some pretty eye-popping behaviour.<\/p>\n
And all this from the pen of the actress who played that nice Patsy Mount in Call the Midwife and a young Camilla Shand (as she then was) in The Crown.<\/p>\n
Then again it was Emerald who took up the writing baton from Phoebe Waller-Bridge for the second BBC series of the distinctly kinky Killing Eve as well as collaborating with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the Gothic \u2013 that word again \u2013 retelling of Cinderella.<\/p>\n
And yet, encounter Fennell in the flesh and she couldn\u2019t be jollier: a sort of uber-glamorous captain of hockey complete with cut-glass accent and near-permanent wraparound smile.<\/p>\n
She certainly has the credentials to create a world peopled by the posh and privileged. The elder daughter of society jeweller Theo Fennell and his novel-writing wife, Louise, her younger sister, Coco, is a successful fashion designer. Educated at Marlborough College (the Princess of Wales\u2019s alma mater). Fennell, 38, was born sucking the proverbial silver spoon.<\/p>\n
READ MORE <\/strong> Eternal Sunshine’s director ‘can’t watch the film anymore’<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI think one of the main things my parents did for my sister and me was that they never banned television,\u201d she explains. \u201cWe were taught to use our imaginations in any way we could, even if the stories we were exposed to \u2013 via TV and reading \u2013 were absolutely not age-appropriate.<\/p>\n “If I believed there was a ghost in my bedroom at night, that wasn\u2019t a bad thing. That was evidence of a vivid imagination.\u201d So it wasn\u2019t perhaps too surprising that the first two books she wrote \u2013 Shiverton Hall in 2013 and its sequel, The Creeper, a year later \u2013 were horror stories specifically aimed at young adults, as she explained.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s no coincidence that the books we read when we\u2019re young are filled with villains: the witch in the barley-twist and liquorice house; the piper who lures children to their doom; the poison apple and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n Her first adult book, Monsters, published in 2015, featured a 12-year-old orphan girl who becomes unhealthily fascinated by a series of murders in a deceptively idyllic Cornish village. \u201dThere were no ghosts or vampires in that one,\u201d says Fennell cheerily. \u201cOnly human monsters.\u201d<\/p>\n But for all that, you don\u2019t enjoy an apparently seamless run of success unless you possess a combination of talent and determination.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/36\/590x\/secondary\/5048372.jpg?r=1699031318721\")
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