Academy Award-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s (Promising Young Woman) sophomore feature is a sumptuously wicked tale of extreme privilege and destructive desire. An outsider at Oxford University, first-year Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and impossibly handsome young aristocrat Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites Oliver to Saltburn, his eccentric family’s sprawling estate, for the summer break. Oliver’s stay at Saltburn soon turns into a heady haze of black-tie dinners and Gatsby-esque garden parties, and he seizes the opportunity to ingratiate himself into the Catton clan. However, his presence starts to upset the family’s precarious balance and things soon take a nasty turn.

Fennell proves her talent for delightfully twisted black comedies here. Saltburn draws from classic literary rich kid texts like Brideshead Revisited and The Secret History and is set to a soundtrack of mid-2000s dancefloor hits from Bloc Party and MGMT. Playing Felix’s parents, Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant are having the time of their lives. Euphoria’s Elordi and Conversations with Friends star Alison Oliver are irresistible as the seductive Catton siblings. And Keoghan, nominated for an Oscar earlier this year for The Banshees of Inisherin, is at his mystifyingly sinister best in the Tom Ripley-like lead role.