There are a few tried & true Awards Bait subgenres that always get released in bulk this time of year, in hopes of dredging up some much-coveted Oscar Buzz: the miserabilist drama in which glamorous movie stars bravely ugly themselves up to look like downtrodden commonfolk, the Wikipedia-summary biopic in which movie stars cosplay as recognizable historical figures through prosthetic “transformations”, the buttoned-up period piece that scoops up a couple easy Best Costume Design statues while no one is looking, etc.  As much as The Academy has strived to change public perception of what qualifies as “An Oscars Movie” by diversifying its voting membership in recent years, we all still recognize Awards Bait when we see it.  That’s what makes it so fun to spot the interlopers among traditional late-in-the-year releases – the trashy genre pictures that somehow get mismarketed as Serious Dramas for Adults to help fill out studios’ FYC publicity campaigns.  Every now and then a sickly, grotesque psychological thriller like Joker will win a couple Oscars because it happens to star Joaquin Phoenix, who was grandfathered in as an Awards Contender from past, prestigious work.  The Shape of Water, The Silence of the Lambs, Misery, Traffic, Training Day, Suicide Squad, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . . . There’s room for one or two trashy genre pictures to sneak into every Awards Season conversation, often resulting in the Oscars’ most controversial Major Category wins.  Personally, I always find the chaotic discourse sparked by those lowly genre outliers amusing this time of year, since everything else about the Awards Season ritual feels so predictably repetitive & set in stone.

Since the hyperbolic decrying of Joker as “dangerous” and (more credibly) creatively bankrupt in 2019, I’m not sure there’s been a more divisive genre winner than Emerald Fennell’s debut Promising Young Woman, which won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar the very next year (among five nominations, including Best Picture).  A bitterly funny rape revenge thriller with a music video pop art aesthetic, Promising Young Woman was mostly treated as a Serious Film worthy of awards consideration because of its relevance to #MeToo era feminism.  If released in any other context than the Awards Season window the year Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to prison, it likely would have been ignored by the Awards Industry establishment, as most high-style, low-logic thrillers are.  Instead, it became a hotly debated item of great political importance that year, picked apart for months by critics and the general commentariat for the ways its feminist talking points fall apart under politically informed scrutiny (especially as it resolves in last-minute copaganda).  Just a couple years later, Fennell’s follow-up, Saltburn, is repeating the same pattern.  An airport paperback mockbuster version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Saltburn is trashy, catty pulp that has the misfortune of being marketed & evaluated as Serious Art.  It’s another deliciously styled, politically vapid thriller from Fennell, who still has yet to learn how to land a dismount in the last few pages of her screenplays but fills those pages with plenty eye candy to keep you smiling on the journey to that letdown.  If released in the summer under any other director’s name, it would likely get by okay as Skinsploitation schlock, but the film festival & FYC awards screener ritual is unkind to that kind of beach-read indulgence – whether or not it eventually wins her a second Oscar. 

I don’t think all of this instant, widespread scrutiny is healthy for Emerald Fennell’s art or career.  Saltburn is an improvement over Promising Young Woman in most formalist contexts, but her loopy screenwriting impulses & confused politics persist here in a way that’s going to make her a repeat target for vitriolic discourse if she doesn’t start cutting her teeth on quieter projects.  Here, she makes a grand political statement on the issue of Class instead of the issue of Misogyny, tracking the sinister social ladder maneuvers of a cash-strapped Barry Keoghan among the friends, family, and portraits of “dead rellies” on Jacob Elordi’s grand, titular estate.  Anyone who’s ever seen a class-interloper thriller before knows exactly where Saltburn is going about halfway into the first act, so it’s unclear how shocking the details of Keoghan’s violent climb up the University of Oxford social ladder are supposed to be as they’re gradually doled out as gotcha reveals.  The details of his obsessive, covetous attraction to Elordi’s dirtbag rich boy hunk are a fun diversion from the FYC season’s traditionally stuffy, buttoned up fare, though, especially by the time Keoghan is slurping up Elordi’s bathwater after a vigorous jerk off session.  There’s a lot to be annoyed about in Saltburn if you’re looking for critical ammunition: the impatient trailer & recap montages that bookend the story, the choice to frame the grand opulence of its vast exteriors in Academy Ratio, the anachronistic needle drops that fall outside its 2006 setting, etc.  I guess I just didn’t take it seriously enough to be enraged by it, the way much more serious critics are.  To me, it falls more in the trashy, disposable lineage of a Gossip Girl, Cruel Intentions, Fierce People, or Do Revenge than in the lineage of great works like Mr. Ripley or Kind Hearts & Coronets.  It’s dumb, harmless fun.

I at least understand how Fennell’s precedence as a promising Oscar Winner earns Saltburn an automatic slot in the Awards Season conversation.  The Thomasin McKenzie vehicle Eileen is more of an enigma in that context, even though it’s the better film.  Is it McKenzie’s association with recent (and likewise divisive) Oscar-winner Jojo Rabbit?  Is it the venerated movie star glamour of co-star Anne Hathaway?  Hard to say.  The marketing for Eileen seems to be leaning on its Christmastime setting and its themes of lesbian obsession to position it as an indulgence in Carol cosplay.  Calling it “Carol for perverts” might be bordering on redundancy, so maybe let’s settle for “Carol as dime store paperback noir.”  It’s as if a Patricia Highsmith obsessive found Todd Haynes’s adaptation of The Price of Salt a little too classy to properly represent her work, so it was time to dirty up her reputation again.  As soon as its title card materializes in throwback 40s noir font, it’s clear that the movie is having fun with familiar genre tropes, resurrecting an outdated mode of crime thriller screenwriting in seedy homage.  What follows is a fun, loopy, perversely detailed daydream that doesn’t make much sense in the context of real-world logic, but follows the sweaty, impulsive logic of noir-era crime novels.  It’s a story told through intrusive thoughts, illustrating the violent & sexual fantasies of McKenzie’s character as she imagines fucking or killing everyone within arm’s reach – depending on whichever desire applies.  It takes a while for her to lose the distinction between imagined behavior vs. real-world action, saving the movie’s physically violent turn for third-act catharsis, but there’s plenty trashy, sordid imagery to string the audience along to that shocker conclusion.

Like Saltburn, Eileen is less commendable for the events of its plot than it is for the tensions between its two main characters.  McKenzie’s protagonist is just as much of a violent little outsider weirdo as Keoghan’s; she just does as a better job of managing her violent impulses . . . for a while.  She stars as a lonely small-town prison employee with no regular social interaction outside the verbal abuses of her alcoholic father (Shea Whigham), who describes her as a non-person, the 1960s equivalent of an NPC.  Filling her days with chronic masturbation and daydreams of bloodshed, she’s shaken out of her routine by the hiring of a new prison psychologist: a chain-smoking Hitchcock blonde played by an unusually devious Hathaway.  The film’s visual echoes of Carol set up an expectation that Hathaway will be more involved in the central drama than she really is; she’s really just there to accelerate the obsessive, intrusive impulses of McKenzie’s imagination until tragedy inevitably strikes.  Like in Saltburn, the lurid promise of their same-sex attraction is never physically consummated between bedsheets, but instead pays off in murder.  Neither work could be credibly accused of “queerbaiting”, though, since their main characters’ sexual desires are explicitly detailed to the point of obsessive kink.  It’s just that they’re both more psychological thrillers about intensely strange social outsiders than they are proper erotic thrillers about genuine, dangerous relationships.  Most of the sordid action takes place in the characters’ warped imaginations.  In that context, Eileen is the more satisfying movie of the pair, since it’s more of a thorough character study of a single person’s psyche than it is diagnostic of a larger, metaphorical social issue.

I don’t mean for this pairing to be predictive of either film’s Awards Season chances.  I have no idea whether Saltburn or Eileen will make a dent on professional publications’ Best of the Year lists or stick around for the grueling gauntlet of Oscars Discourse.  I’m only responding to them in this context because they were screened for critics’ Awards Consideration in the final month of the year instead of being unceremoniously ignored the way most trashy, pulpy thrillers are for rest of the calendar.  The reasoning for that awards push is baffling to me in both cases, outside maybe the chance they give their actors to try out new, exotic accents onscreen (English & New English, respectively).  I welcome the kind of discoursive chaos genre films like this bring to the Awards Season ritual, though, no matter how little they belong in conversation or how annoying that conversation gets when they happen to break through & win something.

-Brandon Ledet