THIS PAST YEAR, I saw perhaps the subtlest skewering of contemporary class performance that I’ve ever witnessed. Oddly, it was buried within an otherwise unsubtle tale. Saltburn, by writer/director Emerald Fennell, takes explicit delight in ogling at the richest of the rich. It’s an almost immorally beautiful film, which an AI might have plotted had it been given the prompt, ‘Rewrite the first third of Brideshead Revisited with Tom Ripley as the protagonist.’

The film follows Oliver, who aspires to befriend and eventually become Felix, the most aristocratic classmate in their year at Oxford. And we can understand why. Oliver’s obsession with Felix’s privilege mirrors the audience’s: Felix is impossibly charismatic (he is portrayed by Australian heart-throb Jacob Elordi), and his family home, where Oliver stays for the summer, is achingly grand. All this desire and longing turns to desperation, however, when Felix suddenly decides to do something nice for poor Oliver. And Oliver is poor. Or at least, that’s what he’s led Felix to believe by providing a backstory that includes just enough detail (a dead father) and just enough sordid allusion (addiction, housing estates and a fractured relationship with his mother) to hint at a life of abuse and deprivation.