When I was 13, I had a chance to enroll in a private school. I could have macked my way into the elite. I could have worn a suit every day. I could have undertaken a Rabbinical parsing of In Search of Lost Time or The Glass Bead Game and become an influential public intellectual, or at least a much more obnoxious talk-show host and overnight pump-‘n’-munch clerk.

It was a Christian school, but I’m convinced that, despite the preponderance of the evidence to the contrary, I could have kept my saucier opinions close to my chest until I sensed some rich, hot Methodist weakening. I could have gotten my cult off the ground more successfully than I did as “the Jim Jarmusch of literature.”

I decided to stick with my run-down public school, with its trailers, broken windows, and smack epidemic, for reasons I didn’t understand, perhaps because I knew I wanted to spend my 20s bumming smokes in Chicago, not vivisecting orphans at McKinsey. I choose to believe I made the right choice for me, if not the world, which desperately needs more qualified sadists and sickos in positions of power. No more Mayor Petes!

Still, Saltburn, the much-ballyhooed new feature from Emerald Fennel, who won an Oscar for the twisty, riveting, genuinely provocative revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, makes me wonder if I missed out on a woozy, sleazy, sexy disaster in which one of the main characters is a mansion. For every choice we make, there are infinite paths untaken.

Saltburn, which is neither as lean or as mean as Promising Young Woman but is a kinky, surreal, and singular feast for the senses, is the story of Ollie (Barry Keoghan). We don’t know much about Ollie’s background because he’s a serial liar, set on bamboozling his affluent classmates at Oxford, using his played-up social awkwardness and bedraggled appearance (imagine a cross between a pre-Hogwarts Harry Potter and Hollywood-era Charles Bukowski) to hide his cruelty, mastery of social dynamics, and raging thirst for operatic vengeance that is either baked into his DNA, exacerbated by the callous, spoiled airheads around him, or both.

We know all this because we see most of the story through Ollie’s POV, and inevitably end up rooting for him even though, contrary to a few takes I’ve read, he’s not a class war vigilante. He’s not Dexter. He’s a particularly exciting antihero because he does the things you would never admit to yourself—outside of the depths of an EMDR reverie or ayahuasca trip—you want to do or have done to you. You can tell how dangerously close those desires are to the surface of your psyche by how violently you get grossed out by them.

It’s been compared to The Talented Mister Ripley, which doesn’t really work—they’re both movies about con artists who exploit handsome, wealthy idiots (in this case, played by Jacob Elordi, who, dare I say it, is better than Jude Law) while avoiding the snares of bon-vivant hangers-on who know bullshit when they smell it.

Not unlike Ripley, it has a half-dozen Oscar-worthy performances, most notably from Rosamund Pike as Lady Eslbeth Catton, Felix’s large adult mom, a motormouthed, insecure, gullible know-it-all who’d steal every scene in any other movie. Archie Madekwe, as Ollie’s nemesis Farleigh, is well on his way to being, if not the thespian’s thespian Phillip Seymour Hoffman was, then at least almost as funny. Alison Oliver, as Felix’s masochistic sister Venetia, is very good at being bone-chilling in a sexy way and excruciatingly sexy in a physically painful, bone-chilling way.

It’s a stacked ensemble, making Saltburn the kinky, gothic-romantic answer to Clue, among other, more serious things.

But Saltburn has layers. And a certain, uh… X factor.

If you’ve heard anything about this movie, it likely regards what I’m going to call—just for shits, giggles, and maze murders—the sex scenes. These include:

• Ollie drinks his lunkheaded love object’s bathwater and slurps the filthy drain
• Ollie “earns his red wings” with life-threatening gusto (there is objectively nothing gross about this, but not everyone is as cosmopolitan as I am)
• We see a whole flock of dong shots (and, as a friend observed, “not the dicks you’d want to see, either”)
• Someone gets jacked off and instructed to behave
• So, so much more happens, and I don’t want to spoil it, in case you’re, to invoke the late, great Michael Hutchence, ”one of my kind”

Saltburn is the Wu-Tang Forever of sexualized violence. It’s a gratuitous overserving of something that, at scale, turns out to be much more esoteric and genuinely disturbing than you’d realized when it was considered hip in more easily digestible portions.

I’m always hesitant to recommend stuff like this. If you don’t consume BDSM-saturated content regularly, which the modal person unfortunately does not, there’s a very good chance it will distract you from most of what you might otherwise dig about it.

It’s worth getting past that. And even if you can’t or don’t want to, I strongly recommend this as a date-night movie, especially if you have hyperactive kids and a spouse with whom you share a concealed surplus of covert hostility and chronic disappointment. (The modal American considers this much more normal and healthy than blood play.)

Rough sex, you see, can save the world. When you sublimate your sadism and masochism, you start wars, argue on the internet, and wallow in victimhood at the expense of empowerment and growth.

On the other hand, if you get off the cross and out of the tank and use Saltburn as your inspiration for a night of mutually degrading, lovemaking hate-sex, you still won’t be as effortlessly awesome as me or my college friend-with-benefits who, during sex, repeatedly quoted Deliverance. 

That’s fine. I’d be terrified to live in a world where everyone was like me. The world needs Very Vanilla as much as it needs Neopolitan with salty, violently delicious dark chocolate chunks. There’s room for both of us.

Still, you’ll be amazed at how purged, empowered, and redeemed you feel.

Saltburn is more than a dark, humid ensemble comedy and gothic-romantic thriller with not an inch of film or soundtrack wasted. It’s a fun, pulpy, sufficiently unpredictable romp unapologetically dripping with symbolism, referencing everything from Homer to Brideshead Revisited to the comically conflicted UK version of jetsetting, prostitution-adjacent hookup culture. It’s like the Kama Sutra but more practical. If you hate it or love to hate it or hate to love it, it’s about you.

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