Saltburn was a really fantastic movie that I'd describe as "shocking ostentatious homosexual british visceral cinematic maximalism". It goes hard in a lot of ways.
I recently watched Citizen Kane and they also went very hard with the 4:3 framing. I'm not a film expert or anything, but 4:3 seems like a very natural ratio to compose around. Every scene is delectable and intentional. Like Everything Everywhere All at Once, it's something you might watch just for the visual element.
I know a only little bit about scene composition, but I can't help but wonder, why did we ever do away with the 4:3 ratio? I feel like it makes for opportunities for composition that are simply impossible with wider ratios.
Two figures standing at either ends of the frame, silhouetting the sides in black, tightening the edges of the screen to make what's left of the scene something more akin to a doorway? That's excellent. Basically the opposite of the [S] Cascade big reveal.
Maybe I just feel that the left and the right sides of the screen simply must be close enough to one another to make certain compositions.
The rest of the cinematography was just excellent too. I can't tell you anything about "f-stops" or "grain" or whatever. All I can say is that every frame was just packed with emotion. The whole thing felt dreamlike. I bet at least half the frames from the movie would look good printed and hung on a wall.
The reason I'm meandering about the cinematography is because I don't want to talk about the narrative.
The problem is that I don't think I can recommend Saltburn to people. The expectation in our communities is that recommendations come married with content warnings. This conflicts with a narrative that makes sparing but effective use of shock value-- when you have a shocking scene, the facts of it stick in your mind without requiring any further reminders at all.
A content warning list would lessen the shock and the impact of the film! But I don't exaggerate when one of the scenes made me gag. I had to remind myself it wasn't real.
There were qualities to the film that reminded me of Nope (2022), in a way that I can't meaningfully say without spoiling it. It's something I wish I saw in theaters so that the film would be inescapable.
I hope I'm not hyping up this film too much. A lot of people don't like it. I'll give some vague content warnings in the form of rot13 texts:
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