Now that the dust has settled on Emerald Fennell’s gothic class thriller, Saltburn, the consensus seems more or less unanimous: the film’s indulgent style comes at the expense of its subject, inspiring more memes than critical acclaim. In the wake of its release in November, wealthy TikTok users took to recreating its final scene, dancing through their own mansions to the sound of Sophie Ellis Bextor’s 2001 pop hit “Murder on the Dance Floor” (which was propelled back into the UK dance charts, hitting number two in the second week of January). As one critic wrote in a Guardian review of the film, “I never wanted to go to an Oxbridge college until I saw Saltburn. [Fennell] makes both Oxford and wealth look ridiculously, fabulously fun.” Superficially, Saltburn appears to mark another entry in the ever-growing class of eat-the-rich films — grisly tales of the downfalls of the grotesquely wealthy. But in reality, it leaves its viewers wanting to emulate the cannibalized.

The eat-the-rich genre is tailor-made to our particular economic moment, when, for the first time in twenty-five years, extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased in tandem, leaving the richest 1 percent with nearly two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020, according to a 2023 Oxfam report. Films like Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness or Mark Mylod’s The Menu successfully lampoon this new class of international robber barons, like the elderly British couple aboard Östlund’s cruise ship, who get blown up by the same grenades they’ve been peddling to war-torn countries for billions. But Saltburn, unlike Triangle of Sadness or The Menu, aims it sights at an older class enemy: the British aristocracy.

Oliver Quick (played by Barry Keoghan) arrives at Oxford on a scholarship, his home circumstances dire and his social status no better. He falls for the beautiful Felix Catton, who befriends him, pities him, treats him as a curiosity from the “real” world, and invites him to spend the summer at his family home, Saltburn (really Drayton House, a largely sixteenth-century English mansion, affectionately described by Horace Walpole, pioneer of the gothic novel, as “a most venerable heap of ugliness, with many curious bits”). Over the course of his sultry summer stay, Oliver’s obsession with the Cattons intensifies — with fatal consequences for every member of the family.