Saltburn
Incredible British improvement over Ripley’s Game, with an amazing soundtrack. Barry Keoghan had earned it at grave fucking, but he also had to have that dance at the end too.
Poor boy Olly goes to Oxford, on his worst hand-me-down clothes, and gets completely savaged by public school upper class twits. His only “friend” is some dweeb he hates.
He slowly but steadily works up the courage to talk with a popular boy, which defends his new “pet” from the ravages of the clique, until tragedy strikes, and the popular boy asks the wallflower to spend the summer in his mansion.
He is introduced to more upper class idiots, grade-A pure British twats. The aloof pater familis, the motor mouth snivelling matriarch, the live-in charity junkie, and the kids: our hunk, his emo alienated sister, and the token charity American descendant. The help is headed by someone who looks like Lurch from The Addams Family.
During that summer, our protagonist has the opportunity to explore his fluid sexuality with members of both sexes, and achieve… Sorry, no, that’s not what happens, at all! Olly does explore bodily fluids, from bath water white with cum, to the remains of unfecundated human eggs.
Olly is Quick to weasel himself into the household, he can listen behind doors, even provide much needed sexual release for all kinds of members. This makes him invaluable, too important to expel.
He has to endure some humiliation, such as singing Rent on karaoke, or being absolutely unmasked by his “lover”. Turns out his story is absolutely fake, he’s a regular boring middle class guy, his parents are suburban dwellers.
After this, accidents start to happen, people start dying, but our stiff upper lip people prevail. After a couple years, the mansion is signed up to him, he won! The idiots lost. Time for a celebratory choreography.
The whole thing has a lot of incredible set pieces, from the opening oner (there’s only one hidden cut, from the crane to the handheld), the mansion presentation, and that finale. That’s only in a cinematography level, all the scenes where Barry Keoghan does weird shit are simple but with the correct audio choices.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.